9/1/2023 0 Comments Houdini movie 1998![]() It wasn't as prying or explicit about Houdini's personal life, but it was easily as entertaining and less messy. "Houdini" was also the title of a 1953 movie biography starring Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. After a medium fails to make psychic contact with Mama's spirit, Houdini embarks on a prolonged rampage against all crystal ball gazers, denouncing them as "the lowest form of life." Like most everything else in the film, this bit is done, as it were, to death. The movie flounders when Houdini freaks over the death of his mother in 1913. Another villainous boss, and so soon? Densham is never content to do anything just once everything must be repeated for fear we didn't get the point. One or two scenes later, when Ehrich tries out for vaudeville with his brother Theo, the producer is a petty tyrant who tries to force himself on the future Mrs. Little Ehrich's boss at a sweatshop is a petty tyrant and antisemite. The mama's boy angle is never fully explained, and it conflicts with Houdini's stated mission of breaking all ties that bind him. The seance is a pretty corny device, but it builds to an ending that is effectively eerie.īorn Ehrich Weisz, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, Houdini suffers through the death of his father and grows up very attached to Mama, played by the ever-enigmatic Grace Zabriskie. It's 10 years after Houdini's death and Rhea Perlman, as the medium, is trying to summon his spirit for the benefit of Bess and a few others who knew him. ![]() Her arguments with Houdini have no apparent motivation other than Densham's desire to inject spurious conflict.Īs the movie clunks along, chronological episodes from Houdini's life are intercut with a bizarre seance supposedly broadcast by a radio station. ![]() Late in the film she appears to have a bout with alcoholism, but that consists of exactly one scene in which she holds a drink and slurs words. She's just sort of sweet and nice and adoring of Houdini. As Bess, Stacy Edwards seems lost in a fog, but in her defense, Pen Densham, who wrote and directed the film, didn't make Bess much of a part to play. He does a good job of imparting Houdini's fiery fanaticism. Schaech, in addition to boasting a bulgy physique, puts in a performance that is strenuous and intense. Some viewers will empathize with Houdini's wife, Bess, who, early in the second hour of the two-hour film, laments, "Just tell me when it's going to end." Unfortunately, that's about the only idea the movie has, and after a while, watching Houdini pop out of this and crash out of that becomes tedious. ![]() In facing mortality and defying it repeatedly, the movie says, Houdini not only thrilled and frightened audiences but in a sense liberated them as well. The movie, premiering tomorrow night at 8, presents Houdini as a man whose life was one long string of challenges to death. We watch as Schaech wriggles and writhes on a soppy wet floor, and soon enough he's a free man, much to the consternation of the constabulary. ![]() It's 1906, and the fabled illusionist is proving to a skeptical audience of prison officials that he can break out of a jail cell even while bound by chains. "Houdini," the TNT cable network's new movie biography of the famous magician, could have been called "Hunkdini," because in the first scene and a couple of others, actor Johnathon Schaech, in the title role, parades around in a black bikini that might have come from Frederick's of Hollywood. ![]()
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