The Man from Beyond

The Man from Beyond (1922)

Houdini has such legend around him, I went ahead with this fairly creaky silent film anyway. And it has some great aspects if you can go with the style.

The premise is simple—two men stuck in the arctic ice go looking for shelter and by a miracle stumble on an abandoned ship stuck in the ice for a century. And they find a man frozen in ice for the same 100 years—and wake him! Yes, and they by some snap of the fingers find their way back to New York, where the two men want to present their revived fellow to the world.

All of this is great fantasy stuff, almost like time-travel, with some action adventure tossed in. One of the two original lost men is a crazed scientist, the other a "half breed," and so things have to percolate of course. And the frozen man, now quite normal if a bit confused to be in 1920 instead of 1820, has to grapple with all the problems of being out of place. The theme that is forced on the film is reincarnation, and it's a bit stiff for modern tastes.

The filming is fairly straight forward, even compared to some better films from earlier (like, yes, "Birth of a Nation" which is 1915). The plot is often told with intertitles instead of action, out of necessity, but it slows it down. (One of the arts of silent films is how they learn to make clear the plot visually.)

Houdini plays the frozen man (no surprise there) and he falls in love with the wrong woman and generally makes a mess of things. Yet, love being what it is, things are not all bleak. It's a curious contrivance of events. And there are even flashbacks (some going back 100 years to when the man was last conscious). There are also different tints to different sections of the film, which is common for the time and effective.

Of course, the bottom line is whether to see this movie, and why. First of all, if you haven't seen silent films before, start with something great so you'll see what they are capable of. The terrific comics (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd) are dependable. If you stretch back to 1922, there are more elegantly made movies from this time, for sure—check out D.W. Griffith.

But if you are Houdini fan, or you already know what silent movies are all about, this is a decent but not spectacular film. It feels too stiff too often, is wordy, and lacks a consistent trajectory for the plot. The storytelling is fairly complex, so you have to keep on your toes—which is good. It won't bore you for that reason.

You might get tired of the middle half, where the sparring for the woman in question is sometimes dull stuff. The Houdini part? Well, you'll see. There is one major "escape" shown, and there is a wonderful final long scene at Niagara falls, without intertitles, dramatic and fast paced.

Written by the master escape technician, Harry Houdini, THE MAN FROM BEYOND is a fantasy of one who lived before, and is also produced and stars Houdini, who portrays Howard Hillary, an Arctic explorer who is revived after being encased within ice for 100 years aboard a ghost ship, and who then must deal with a vastly changed world. This is the first effort released by Houdini Picture Corporation, and is filmed in large part at and about Lake Placid in New York, and Niagara Falls to the brink of which the stalwart Hillary is whirled in his efforts to save his lady love, Felice (Jane Connelly), from apparently certain death by drowning and, previously, from designs of immoral blackguards. The plot is quite melodramatic, as Felice, in Hillary's eyes, was his fiancee aboard the Arctic vessel wherein he was trapped by a storm following a losing battle with the ship's captain, and he must, in 1922, convince her that she was his beloved in an earlier manifestation a century of years before, and thereby wrest her from her current beau, who has designs upon her fortune, and the latter's partner in crime, Marie La Grande (Nita Naldi in a brief appearance). Houdini, who utilized the sobriquet Man From Beyond, was enthralled by the possibility of linkage between the material world and a spiritual domain (although he detested spiritualists), and his script conveys his philosophy rather didactically as based upon his extensive study of the arcane.

Early in his career on the stage escape artist and magician Harry Houdini made a living partly showing how the popular faze of spiritualists were hoodwinking the public. He did this by demonstrating to his audiences some of the tricks they used to supposedly communicate with the dead. Houdini still believed there was a spiritual world in the afterlife, but he saw the dishonesty of those who exhibited such interactions with the dead during their seances. When he met Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, novelist of super sleuth Sherlock Holmes, the two established a friendship despite the writer possessng a firm belief in spiritualism, reinforced by the death of his son during World War One who he felt was always near him .

Houdini had acted in a series of films before he established his own movie production company to get more control over his pictures. Partly inspired by Doyle's firm belief in the spiritual world, the magician embarked on a project that dealt with reincarnation and the afterlife. In April 1922's "The Man From Beyond," he plays a man frozen on an old sunken Arctic ship who's thawed out, only to eventually meet his fiancee of 100 years before. She, meanwhile, is caught up in a riveting scheme by modern day shysters.

Doyle was impressed by the Houdini movie. The author believed the magician had super human powers in interacting with the next dimension by his staged acts. The writer's second wife, Jean Leckie, was a self-prescribed spiritualist who claimed she could communicate with Houdini's late wife. Harry agreed to attend her session. When Jean produced a handwritten passage of her transcription of what Houdini's mother claimed to say during the seance, he scoffed at the session. His mother, he claimed, did not know hardly any English, yet Jean's submitted page had her speaking flawless English.

Houdini and Doyle argued the point in public, causing a rift in their friendship. The magician did agree with his wife Bess that if he died he would attempt to communicate with her in secret code. When he passed away from an untimely death in 1926, she conducted a seance every year around Halloween for 10 years, when she gave up the annual tradition. "10 years is long enough to wait for any man," she lamented.

"The Man From Beyond" was Houdini's fourth movie, which didn't produce the box office results he had hoped for. He acted and produced in one more film, 'Haldane of the Secret Service,' in 1923, before he gave up movies and returned to the stage. As one biographer commented, "His 'acting' consists of three expressions: pucker-lipped flirtatiousness, open-eyed surprise, and brow-knitted distress."

I've been a Houdini fan since I was a kid, so when I ran across this movie on VHS I bought it. This is the story of a man frozen in time and coming to life to find himself finding his soul-mate about to marry a man after her money. He must convince her that she's making a mistake and show the fiancé up for the villain he is. During the course of the movie, Houdini shows us some of the escapes he was famous for.

While I agree with the comments that this movie is overly melodramatic, most of the silents of that era were. Yes, it's got all the overly-exaggerated gestures and wide-eyed looks.

In spite of this, I watched with fascination as Houdini, the man who help audiences in the palm of his hand, hammed it up through this movie. A great actor, he's not. But for most of us, it's the only chance we'll ever have to see the Great Houdini. Most magicians can out-perform him now, but in his heyday, he was the one and only.

As Houdini's only appearance on DVD, you can find this rare gem at Amazon, or Deep Discount DVD.

...where he plays Howard Hillary, who has been frozen aboard a ship in the arctic for a hundred years. Some explorers find him, thaw him out and wake him up, and try to reintroduce him to society. Howard is obsessively in love with Felicia (Jane Connelly), but she's been dead for a century. He becomes convinced that she has been reincarnated in the modern age, and he's determined to find her and reignite their love. He also gets entangled with people trying to swindle a fortune. Also featuring Arthur Maude, Albert Tavernier, Erwin Connelly, Frank Montgomery, Luis Alberni, Yale Benner, and Nita Naldi.

Frozen suspended animation and reincarnation are strange topics to blend together, but with Houdini's interest in fringe theories it makes more sense. This is the first of the great performer's films that I've seen, and it is rather flatly filmed by director Burton L. King. The big finale at Niagara Falls is good, though. Houdini had appeared in two other films and a serial before this, and would make one more film this same year, before his tragic death in 1926.