Houdini

I give this movie a 9 out of 10 for accuracy. The movie was not accurate but it was an awesome entertainment film. If you watch this movie like a movie and not a biography you'll love it. If you watch it the other way around you'll hate it. It was nothing more than a fictional story that had great romance, death defying escapes and personal screw ups with his brother, mother, and wife that ended terrificly. I would encourage anybody that likes magic, escape acts, and romance in a movie to watch it. Houdinit is a movie that I have watched several time and would watch again. I love the song "Rosebell" that happens to play all throughout the movie.

It is not a biographic movie. It is not homage to a great artist. It is only exploration of a myth. With errors, good intentions and a lot of exaggerations. A film for Johnathon Schaech's charm and for beginning of childhood dreams taste. Delicate and sweet, for who knows than magic is an ingredient of existence. For dreamers. And for remember a name. Old, lost, fascinating. It is not a film about Houdini. It is a short story about a character with his name but others ways of life and different nuances of facts. May be a Rider Digest material. About a shadow of a strange time for who the limits are fiction. "Houdini" is not a bad movie. And not a masterpiece. Only a show, very delicate with details but , in fact, a beautiful stamp, it is first step to discover a impressive science to broke the limits and to understand the days more than a summer rain.

When Tony Curtis played Harry Houdini in the 1953 George Pal movie, the fact that it wasn't historically accurate wasn't of serious concern, and the movie is entertaining for what it is.

The TV movie THE GREAT HOUDINIS was a hasty little film of no particular interest; it's hardly memorable. But by the time 1998 rolled around, the opportunity existed to tell an accurate version of Houdini's life -- and Pen Densham not only wildly blows this, he made a movie that's actually insulting to Houdini's memory, which wasn't true of the earlier versions.

The movie falsifies every relationship it depicts; Houdini's brother wasn't a whining ingrate, Houdini's wife Bess was steadfast and loyal, Houdini knew Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for many years, not for the single lunchtime meeting shown in the movie.

But the insulting aspect is the element of spiritualism; Houdini spent years debunking it, and NOT just because mediums couldn't put him in touch with his mother. For the movie to show that survival after death is REAL is a betrayal of one of the main aspects of Houdini's life.

And they also treat his career all wrong. Where was the Handcuff King? Where was the magician who created gigantic illusions, like walking through a wall or making an elephant disappear? Like the George Pal version, this one also invents a lot of malarkey involving the Chinese Water Torture.

Houdini was a very interesting and colorful performer, and he deserves a reasonably accurate biography instead of more claptrap like this.

The biggest trick the writer/directer pulls on us is to hang this fantasy on one of the century's great showbusiness characters. Houdini, the short, wiry-haired immigrant, who spell-bound audiences with the intensity of his eyes and his haunting intimation of his'powers'; angry, petulant, vain and childish, the man puppy-loved his mother till the day he died, indeed, adolescent is perhaps the word to explain his emotional range; but so thrilling, so charismatic was he, audiences would sit electrified, staring at the theatre curtain for an hour, two hours, while behind it, Houdini was struggling manacles, boxes, milk cans... So far away from any attempt at showing us anything about the real man, and with Jonathon Schaech's bland performance not holding the film together, the writer then doesn't even seem to enjoy the world of vaudeville and illusion very much, but spends more time on the seances and the soap-opera domestics. I'm not angry at this movie because I'm a purist who believes Houdini's life is sacrosanct, but that the man and his life are so fascinating, and so full of episodes revealing and suspenseful, that a fictional version of the story can only fail by comparison.

...but he can't escape mediocre movie adaptations of his life. This version is merely adequate when it could have been more. Huge amounts of his career are glossed over (his mixed-religion marriage, his brief movie career in Hollywood, his piloting skills, and even many of his escapes), and the focus is mostly on his romance with Bess Weiss. As such, much of this plays out as a soap opera rather than as the biography of the world's greatest performer. His wife's a drunk (until the end, when that plot element is forgotten), his mother is a harsh tyrant (except we don't see anything to really suggest that), and his brother is a whining ingrate. In other words, it's dreadfully rushed: we're left to assume much, both about Houdini's career and his family life, rather than be shown it. Oddly, the revelation of how Houdini did the milk bottle escape in the middle comes across as unnecessary padding when time could have been spent telling us some of the important stuff. The best parts are the bigger actors in minor roles: Rhea Perlman as a psychic, Paul Sorvino as a glory-hungry radio announcer, George Segal as Houdini's manager, and David Warner as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (although they screw up his relationship with Houdini as well). The ending, with Houdini appearing unseen at his wife's 10th anniversary seance to contact him, redeems much of the movie with a truly romantic ending, though - they actually spend about 12 minutes on it. Unfortunately, by that time we've seen so much of Houdini's Wife the Drunken Shrew that this touching ending is a bit out of place. But hey, at least they (mostly) got how Houdini died correct, which is more than one can say about the previous '53 and '76 versions.