ARNOLD: A disappearing film career

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By Gary Arnold

The Movie Star" preserves the remnants of a movie career that proved fleeting and far less successful than envisioned for the great magician and escape artist Harry Houdini.

The timing was a bit off, but the Houdini vehicles left plenty to be desired. Never classics, they seem lost opportunities at this late date.

Houdini was in his middle 40s when his first starring vehicle, the popular 1919 serial "The Master Mystery," was released. The audience was not discovering a photogenic new star but was watching a pre-eminent vaudeville star and somewhat careworn specialist in death-defying public spectacle try his luck within the adventure-thriller formats of a young mass medium.

The projects in which Houdini's personality and stunts were showcased - the serial and a quartet of features - evidently grew stale and formulaic for audiences upon the release of his third picture, "Terror Island," in 1920. The box office continued to sag during the engagements of two subsequent features, "The Man From Beyond" in 1922 and "Haldane of the Secret Service" in 1923.

Born Ehrich Weisz in Budapest, Hungary, in 1874, he emigrated with his family to the United States in the late 1870s. He derived his professional name from the French magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, active in the mid-19th century. Harry was a variation on his boyhood nickname, Ehrie. His death in 1926 came a few years after he concluded his dalliance with films.

Three of the features - "Terror Island," "Man From Beyond" and "Haldane" - appear to be more or less intact. A few chapters of "The Master Mystery" have not survived, but what remains still constitutes nearly four hours of stilted but fitfully amusing melodrama.

The first Houdini feature, "The Grim Game," evidently is lost. The DVD set preserves five minutes of an aerial stunt that became a legend in its own right because two monoplanes got tangled up on a daredevil transfer by rope from one cockpit to the other. Houdini pretended to be a participant and wove the footage into the finished film.

At one point, Houdini thought movies might permit him to transcend the touring grind of vaudeville. Unfortunately, he remained so wedded to ridiculous, arbitrary plot devices that audiences eager to embrace him were soon way ahead of the hackneyed exposition that shackled his pictures.

Some wonderful fragments are on the third disc: documentary coverage of open-air stunts; a dazzling re-enactment of the first famous Houdini illusion, "Metamorphosis," by his younger brother, Ted; and a delightful 1910 slapstick short, "Slippery Jim," directed by the French trick-shot humorist Ferdinand Zecca in homage to Houdini.

TITLE: "Houdini: The Movie Star"

CONTENTS: Three-disc set that includes a fragmentary movie serial, three features and a sequence from one "lost" feature that starred magician Harry Houdini between 1919 and 1923

RUNNING TIME: About eight hours

DISTRIBUTOR: Kino International

WEB SITE: www.kino.com