Goofs

Newspaper editor looks over layout for "whatever happened to Houdini?" article, then assigns a reporter to go out and investigate the story. This is absolutely backwards - a story of such a speculative nature would always be written first, with layout following after the fact.

In the clip when Houdini is in London demonstrating his escape from a trunk, he gets 2 sailors to check the trunk. On the sailors' blue collars are stars. The Royal Navy did not have stars on their collars.

When the Houdinis and the reporter are being driven to the séance, the same rear projection loop is continually run in the car's back window, repeatedly showing the same background traffic, with the splice where the loop begins plainly visible each time.

There's a revealing jump cut in the authentic sawing-woman-in-half act.

When Houdini is doing the "levitation" trick on the stage, watch as Tony Curtis passes the hoop around Janet Leigh's body: twice you can see the split in the hoop "catch" on the lifting frame behind her body.

Close-up of front page of Variety shows two photos of Houdini making elephant disappear; in era when this story was set, Variety never ran photos, except in ads.

During the straight jacket escape competition we see Houdini focus on the center glass ball of the chandelier. First we see the chandelier all by itself with the center ball nestled in the strands of cut glass. He continues focusing on it while he is working at escaping and we see the glass ball again from a different angle with Houdini in the background only this time it's no longer nestled in the other strands but rather a little lower and more by itself.

Bess takes Harry's place on stage and then swaps clothes with him to facilitate an escape trick. However, since her wrists remain hand cuffed it would not have been possible to remove her jacket.

Near the end, when Bess is in the empty theatre, begging Harry not to do the trick, she is clapping. You can hear the loud claps, although she is wearing gloves on both hands. You would never hear the claps, only muted thuds.

As Harry and Bess are hurriedly leaving after meeting Harry's mother, a photographic flash can be seen as they reach the door.