When the picture came out, a New York film critic enthused, “There is more excitement in one reel of The Grim Game than in any five reels of celluloid I have ever watched.” It owes its realism to the fact that the planes really DID accidentally collide! The director had the presence of mind to order the cameraman to keep rolling and, miraculously no one was killed. The sequence is striking even by today’s standards. Out of the cloud of smoke, Houdini emerges carrying the unconscious damsel. The plane Houdini and the girl are in crashes and a horrified crowd rushes over to the smoking wreck. Suddenly the planes collide and, locked together both go into a tail spin. But what a fragment! In the spectacular sequence, Houdini, chasing by plane a villain who has kidnapped his sweetheart in another airplane, climbs out on the wing at 4,000 feet, then dangles from a rope to get to the cockpit of the other plane. Only a five-minute fragment of the 1919 feature film The Grim Game remains. But hey, James Bond villains have been making that mistake for 50 years!ĭaredevil Houdini wing walks in The Grim Game. One has to suspend disbelief, of course, to buy that the henchmen keep tying the escape artist up instead of simply shooting him.
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Houdini must free himself from an electric chair before a goon can throw the switch escape from the bottom of an elevator shaft where he’s been tied as the car descends save himself from corrosive acid that spreads toward him as he lies bound, and a slew of other deadly scenarios. They regularly overpower Houdini and leave him in a deadly and seemingly inescapable predicament at the end of of each episode.
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The villain, whose identity is a mystery, works through a man-sized robot (the first of its kind on film) plus an army of henchmen. While this film won't change your life (like Moulin Rouge did for me), it's well made, well produced, interesting enough and you might learn something about the craft of stage-magic.The Automaton, a hulking robot, menaces Houdini in The Master Mystery.In The Master Mystery (1919) Houdini plays Quentin Locke, an undercover Justice Department agent who infiltrates an evil corporation that purchases scientific inventions solely to keep them off the market. Overall, a great pick for a Sunday afternoon classic. The stage tricks are authentic and build suspense well.
Some excellent examples of coded suggestivity throughout the first half. Plot-wise, it's consistent - each scene has a narrative purpose and the screenwriter balances the plight of a showman versus the relationship with his wife well. Janet Leigh wears some wonderful period/showgirl costumes, and Tony Curtis gets ample an oppurtunity show off the fact that he's been working out, so there is eye candy galore. It does well to keep us under spell of theatricality, and while it's never going to be Moulin Rouge it does hold up well in this department. The real star, in my opinion, was the set design. So I would definitely recommend listening to Kate's less glossy spin on it after watching this (any excuse, though I'm pretty sure she was watching this when she chose to write the song from the perspective of Houdini's wife, Bess). Because I know the song quite well, I was kind of comparing the narrative of this film to the narrative of the song as I was watching, and I felt that the two do compliment each other well. I chose this film on Netflix having heard of Houdini through a Kate Bush song of the same name. wasn't sure at first but it works with Janet Leigh as his wife - so for star power alone it sells its message. A romantic film in colour-popping technicolour about the magic of storytelling and illusionism.
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