Harry Houdini the escape artist is legendary. Houdini the
movie star is less celebrated. This may be due to the poor state of the four
features he made: the first two, 1919’s The
Grim Game and 1920’s Terror Island,
are apparently missing reels. Perhaps it is also due to the quality of the
surviving films. I cannot speak of Houdini’s final film, 1923’s Haldane of the Secret Service, which I
have not seen. The Man from Beyond,
the film he wrote and starred in the previous year, I have.
What initially drew me to this movie, in which Houdini plays
a man unfrozen after 100 years in a block of ice, was the simple curiosity of
seeing the guy in action. The thing is, there isn’t a ton of action in The Man from Beyond. The set up, in
which a pair of explorers chip Howard Hillary (all of Houdini’s feature-film
characters share his initials) out of his chilly tomb, goes on for an eternity.
When he’s out, he only performs a single escape. Those who paid their four
cents, or whatever a movie ticket cost in 1922, to see a film starring Harry
Houdini must have been disappointed by this dearth of the man doing what he was
famous for doing. They were probably further disappointed that he slips from
his straight jacket in an extremely long shot that gives no indication of the artistry
behind the escape. It’s the kind of thing any old actor could have accomplished
with no greater special effects than a few poorly fastened buckles. His
subsequent shimmy up a rope and out the window of a prison-like asylum is more
impressive, but nothing any reasonably athletic stuntman couldn’t have done. In
short, there isn’t much of what made Houdini HOUDINI in The Man
from Beyond.
Houdini's tiny, blurry escape.
What there is is a surprisingly effective supernatural love
story. Before becoming trapped in ice, Hillary was in love with a woman named
Felice Norcross. After his revival, he finds the spitting image of her just as
she’s preparing to wed the nefarious Dr. Trent. By far-fetched coincidence,
this woman’s name is Felice too, but her surname is the more appropriate Strange.
Not yet knowing that he’d spent a century in hibernation, Hillary insists that
Felice is his girlfriend, and she gets some serious déjà vu pangs. This is when
Hillary ends up getting carted off to the asylum. With his escape comes the
most exciting portion of the film as he and Felice hustle to spring her dad
from Trent’s clutches. There’s a decent bit of fisticuffs and a nice climax in
which Hillary and Felice almost pop over Niagara Falls. In the end, there is
talk of how Felice Strange is the reincarnation of Felice Norcross, who makes
a ghostly appearance in the film’s most overt special effects shot.
Even with Houdini’s climb from the asylum and the Niagara
Falls incident, it is the love story that most resounds in The Man from Beyond. Houdini and Jane Connelly give effective
performances as the multi-generation-spanning couple (Connelly is particularly
impressive, so I was surprised to see that her only other credit on imdb is an
uncredited role in Buster Keaton’s Sherlock
Jr.), and the appearance of Norcross’s apparition makes for a quietly
transcendent epilogue. This ending is all the more poignant because within four
years, both Harry Houdini and Jane Connelly would suffer early deaths.
Harry Houdini and Jane Connelly
I may
have heightened that poignancy a bit with my choice of soundtrack, and Kate
Bush’s The Hounds of Love—with its sweeping
romance, eeriness, and side-long concept about a man who freezes to death after
falling overboard only to be reincarnated at the last minute—was an appropriate
choice (Bush had her own fascination with Houdini, to whom she paid tribute on her
previous album The Dreaming).
Despite its flaws—its slowness, its paucity of great
escapes—The Man from Beyond was still
worthwhile viewing for its romance and for the very reason I checked it out in the
first place: the opportunity to see Harry Houdini move and breathe, the chance
to see history come to life.
