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."
