![]() However, on show day, Harry cannot resist the cheers of the audience and the cries of "more", and brings out the bubbling cell for an encore. Also, the plane to plane transfer from Houdini's silent film The Grim Game was re-staged on the Paramount backlot for this film, making it the only biopic to acknowledge Houdini's silent movie career (well, it made an attempt to, at least). Set photos posted on the LIFE magazine website show Curtis and Leigh performing the Cremation illusion, and a recreation of Houdini's Milk Can escape (the prop can used in the film now resides in the Houdini Seance Room at The Magic Castle). Most interesting to long-time fans of HOUDINI is the revelation of several cut scenes. This is one of the most dramatic and memorable scenes in the film, and while Houdini himself was responsible for this fiction, it was actually first slated to appear in the unmade RKO film in 1932. The film also beautifully recreates many of Houdini's most famous escapes, including the straitjacket escape both onstage and suspended, a safe escape, a metal straitjacket (said to be an authentic Houdini prop), a jail escape, and Houdini's ordeal trapped below the ice following his escape from a submerged metal box. As for the stars, Curtis and Leigh are nothing less than glamorous! In fact, it plays as such a magic show, live audiences I've seen it with applaud the conclusion of each trick. Several magical effects are played out in their entirety and primarily in long shot. HOUDINI is mounted as a lavish magic show within a movie. (uncredited) performing the Guillotine act at the SAM convention in the film. And speaking of The Magic Castle, that's co-founder Bill Larsen, Jr. "Dunninger was a blow hard," Curtis would tell a Magic Castle audience in 2009. ![]() Dunninger receives a lavish credit as technical advisor, but according to Tony Curtis, the true technical advisor on the film was George Boston. Other cast included Angela Clarke as "Mama", and Torin Thatcher as Harry's fictional assistant and manager Otto. Pal and director George Marshall cast real-life husband and wife Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh in the roles of Harry and Bess Houdini. This time the result was the big, bold Technicolor treat we know today as HOUDINI. Then in September 1951, Paramount reacquired the rights to the Kellock book from Cohen and Raboff when producer George Pal expressed interest in the project. In May 1949, a former drug store operator, Joseph Raboff, and a real estate man, Earl Cohen, acquired the rights to the Kellock book in the hopes of making a movie and a television series with either John Garfield or Lee Cobb in the lead role. Under the supervision of Dore Schary, several scripts were developed, but no movie ever resulted. In 1936, Beatrice Houdini and her manager Edward Saint sold film rights to the book Houdini His Life Story by Harold Kellock to Paramount. ![]() RKO developed, but never produced, a movie that would be a thinly veiled fictional biopic called Now You See It. Since the 1930s, Hollywood had worked to tell the life of the great magician. While HOUDINI is almost entirely a work of fiction, it does capture the glamor, drama, and danger of Harry Houdini in a way that I think would have made the Master Mystifier proud. It's amazing just how many magic and Houdini buffs, including myself, cite this one film as the reason they became interested in the subject. Unquestionably the most famous Houdini biopic is Paramount's 1953 HOUDINI starring Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh.
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