Here's a bright, colourful, entertaining if not always factually accurate biopic of the great escapologist Harry Houdini. Tony Curtis plays the part with great brio as you'd expect and is well supported by his fretful but usually supportive wife played coincidentally by his real life wife of the time Janet Leigh.
Of course being a Hollywood screen biography, it plays pretty loosely with the facts, most obviously with his apparent death scene in the last reel just after he's broken out of his not-quite death- defying water torture escape. Maybe the director thought that the reputed story of a young student punching him in the stomach unawares was a bit tawdry but this substitute conclusion seemed over-melodramatic in the extreme.
Otherwise, while I'm no expert on Houdini's career I did recognise other familiar incidents in the entertainer's life, including breaking out of a London prison, the straitjacket escape suspended outside a New York skyscraper and the plunge under the ice sealed in a safe although you have to wonder how he could possibly miss the big hole cut in the ice right above him through which the safe was dropped. The movie also takes in his interest in spiritualism as he attempts to connect with his mother in the afterlife after her death.
These quibbles apart, the movie was energetic and highly watchable as befits its subject. Curtis and Leigh make a handsome couple and the sets variously including recreations of a carnival show- ground, jail and vaudeville theatres are also easy on the eye.
In short, this film was fine escapist entertainment - sorry!
Of course being a Hollywood screen biography, it plays pretty loosely with the facts, most obviously with his apparent death scene in the last reel just after he's broken out of his not-quite death- defying water torture escape. Maybe the director thought that the reputed story of a young student punching him in the stomach unawares was a bit tawdry but this substitute conclusion seemed over-melodramatic in the extreme.
Otherwise, while I'm no expert on Houdini's career I did recognise other familiar incidents in the entertainer's life, including breaking out of a London prison, the straitjacket escape suspended outside a New York skyscraper and the plunge under the ice sealed in a safe although you have to wonder how he could possibly miss the big hole cut in the ice right above him through which the safe was dropped. The movie also takes in his interest in spiritualism as he attempts to connect with his mother in the afterlife after her death.
These quibbles apart, the movie was energetic and highly watchable as befits its subject. Curtis and Leigh make a handsome couple and the sets variously including recreations of a carnival show- ground, jail and vaudeville theatres are also easy on the eye.
In short, this film was fine escapist entertainment - sorry!