The Magician's Daughter

News reporter Bob Wilson is in the audience of a magic show performed by Professor Jasper Murdock and his daughter Dolores. He is taken with her and gets invited to the Murdock home. He's been assigned to do a big photo spread of Professor Murdock's act. The professor is angry and Dorlores convinces him to cancel the story. His boss secretly reassigns the story to another reporter.

It's a little disappointing that there are only a few actual tricks. They are using mostly camera tricks and composite filming. These are magical for the early silent film era. By this point, it's rather boring. This short needs to get rid of those. I was happy with the table cloth trick at first, but it's obviously a trick table top. This one depends on how one views the tricks.

A short subject with music, strictly a boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy wins girl sort of routine about a young woman (ELEANOR LYNN) who works in a magic act and a reporter (FRANK ALBERTSON) who threatens to reveal the backstage trickery that her father has used to create a successful vaudeville act. Another reporter makes the headlines when he exposes the act, much to the distress of the girl and her father.

When the woman finally realizes that Frank Albertson is not the one who exposes the trickery, she forgives him in time for a happy ending. Albertson joins in a brief song duet with Lynn that's not bad at all.

The real weakness is that the show biz tricks supposedly done on stage would be impossible to perform in person. They're strictly traceable to movie magic, the kind of visual tricks about disappearances and disembodied humans that can only be performed on film and not possible on stage. Audiences were expected to swallow this ruse in the '30s and not question it.

Magician's Daughter, The (1938)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

MGM short about a reporter who begins to investigate a magician in hopes of proving that he's a fraud but he falls in love with the magician's daughter. The magic tricks look horribly fake and the so called love story is very minor. Not too many laughs either. The directed went on to do The Devil Thumbs a Ride and Donovan's Brain.

Decent but nothing too great.

Turner Classic Movies shows this short every once in a while so if you're interested that would be your best shot at seeing this.

Frank Albertson is a reporter trying to promote an interview with magician Henry Cass. When he sees Cass' daughter Eleanor Lynn, he tries to promote himself with her, but she's more interested in singing "Alone" when his article exposes how he does some of his tricks.

Tommy Bond appears, and everyone in the family has a few magic tricks up a sleeve, including several that Melies thought up in the 19th century. It's another of MGM's shorts that often turned out more bizarre than funny, but here it works amusingly, even though you can see the optical printing lines.

There's a nice example of the guillotine trick on view.