June 22 - Houdini

Today’s movie is a biography with a scene that happens on June 22. Watch it and enjoy.

HOUDINI     

Harry Houdini performs a wild man in a sideshow in return for being allowed to have a magic act. He meets a girl, Bess. He meets her several times and they get married on June 22, 1894. [12:35 to 21:36] They take his magic act on tour with Bess as his assistant. She doesn’t like it so he goes to work in a lock factory. At the Halloween magicians meeting he gets out of a straightjacket, winning the prize of a roundtrip steamship ticket to Europe. . Another magician advises him to drop as he thinks Harry has supernatural powers that would make him famous, but kill him and that only Von Swager had ever had similar abilities. At work Harry locks himself in a safe to try and escape and gets fired, causing an argument with Bess. She changes her mind, trades the ticket in for two one way ones and they go to Europe. After Harry escapes from a cell at Scotland and his European tour is a smash, even though in Germany he is charged with claiming he has supernatural powers, but Harry convinces a court he does not. He had been looking for Von Swager and finally gets a letter from him, but when he goes to eet him Von Swager is dead. His assistant comes to work for Harry and introduces him to the ‘Chinese Water Torture’ stunt. Harry return s to the USA to no notice until he escapes from a straitjacket hanging upside down over a New York street. He tours to great success, even being dropped in an iron box in the frozen Detroit River. After he escapes the box he can’t find the hole, until he hears his mother’s voice calling him and he swims towards it.  He later learns that his mother died at exactly that time and he goes into seclusion. He tries to contact his mother and exposes fake mediums. Houdini tries to return to the stage using the ‘Chinese Water Torture’ but drops it after Bess expresses her worry. At the crowd’s urging he tries it anyway, and since he had been suffering from appendicitis can’t escape, has to be rescued and dies.

        

A some what melodramatic film. Takes great liberties with the facts. Still entertaining though and worth watching.

The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini by Ruth Brandon (Random House, New York, 1993) at page 41 gives the date of the wedding

Producer - George Pal & Berman Swarttz

Director - George Marshall

Screenplay - Philp Yordan

Running Time - 1 hour 46 minutes

Released - July 2, 1953

Starring -  Tony Curtis as Harry Houdini, Janet Leigh as Bess Houdini, Torin Thatcher as Otto, Angela Clarke as Harry's Mother , Stefan Schnabel as German Prosecuting Attorney, Ian Wolfe as Malue, Sig Ruman as Schultz , Michael Pate as Dooley, Malcolm Lee Beggs as British Jail Warden , Frank Orth as Mr. Hunter

Copyright by Ivan Walters in 2015.