Houdini's true escapist fare

In the early years of the 20th century, Harry Houdini was larger than life. He was the world's best-known escape artist, the "king of handcuffs," the No. 1 draw in vaudeville and, according to one biography, "America's first superhero."

It turns out that Houdini also made motion pictures. And thanks to a remarkable new DVD collection, "Houdini: The Movie Star" (Kino, $40), we can see the master entertainer in more than little fragments from ancient newsreels.

The three-disc set not only includes the five silent movies (or remnants of them) that Houdini starred in from 1919 to 1923, but filmed records of some of his greatest escapes from 1907 to 1923 and a recording of his voice.

The son of a rabbi, Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss in Budapest, Hungary, and raised in Appleton, Wis.) had appeared in a French short film in 1901, and his daredevil stunts were filmed throughout the 1900s and 1910s. But it wasn't until 1919, when he had been an international star for nearly 20 years, that Houdini made his first feature-length movie.

"The Master Mystery," released as a 15-part serial running more than 5 1/2 hours, stars Houdini as a government agent investigating a crooked patents company. The story is a silly piece of hooey involving a menacing robot. It's mostly designed to place its star in one restraint or torture device after another at the cliffhanging end of each episode.

A huge hit in the United States and Europe, the serial garnered enthusiastic reviews in the press, with Billboard proclaiming: "This crackerjack production will thunder down the ages to perpetuate the fame of this remarkable genius."

The DVD version runs just short of four hours, with text explaining what's missing.

Only five minutes of Houdini's next film, "The Grim Game" (1919), survive, but they're remarkable. A spectacular scene in which he was attempting to move from one plane to another at 4,400 feet shows the two planes accidentally crashing into each other and going into spiraling descents. The pilots were able to regain control and land safely.

"Terror Island" (1920) features Houdini as the inventor of a high-tech submarine who goes to a mysterious island in the South Pacific to recover jewels in a sunken ship and save the father of the woman he loves. It's a reasonably energetic story filled with the usual escapes and some unusual underwater photography.

Unfortunately, the film also has black actors in absurd garb portraying the savage islanders in a gruesome display of movie racism -- 13 years before "King Kong" did much the same thing.

The lack of success for "Terror Island" led Houdini to form the Houdini Picture Corp. Its first offering, 1922's "The Man From Beyond," reflects Houdini's interest in reincarnation.

He plays a sailor who had been frozen in an 1820 Arctic shipwreck, only to be discovered 100 years later, thawed and brought back to life. He then meets a woman who looks exactly like the woman he had been engaged to a century earlier.

Filmed in Lake Placid, N.Y., and Niagara Falls, the movie includes some spectacular footage of Houdini swimming in rapids just above the falls. According to the DVD, he had a cable attached to his leg while he swam to ensure that he wouldn't go over the falls.

Houdini's final film, 1923's "Haldane of the Secret Service," is a fairly straightforward suspense film -- with the addition, of course, of Houdini's spectacular escapes.

So how good an actor was Houdini?

While no Charlie Chaplin or Greta Garbo among silent-screen actors, Houdini doesn't come across as any more false or exaggerated than the other actors in his films. His performances are relatively underplayed, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Fortunately, the DVD includes examples of Houdini's real-life escapes from straitjackets and handcuffed bridge jumps before thousands of people in the United States and Europe. They are dangerous and truly spectacular, giving modern audiences an inkling of what made him such a major attraction and star.