The kind of sturdy, glossy biopic that makes for ideal Saturday afternoon watching. Obviously, this has been majorly touched up (to the point where many of the pivotal plot points are basically just made up) and there's no real sense of learning who Houdini was or his tricks or anything much deeper than an excuse for Tony Curtis to escape from straitjackets or saw Jane Leigh in half. It's pure fluff but quite handsomely made fluff, especially in the last act where the Technicolor cinematography produces some surprisingly lush images (the seance, Houdini under the ice). Honestly, despite my low ratings for them, this kind of easily digestible picture is among my favorites from Hollywood's classic era. It shows how polished the machinery of this system really could be even in some of its discarded films and how hard the smaller studios worked to match this kind of easy charm.

The kind of sturdy, glossy biopic that makes for ideal Saturday afternoon watching. Obviously, this has been majorly touched up (to the point where many of the pivotal plot points are basically just made up) and there's no real sense of learning who Houdini was or his tricks or anything much deeper than an excuse for Tony Curtis to escape from straitjackets or saw Jane Leigh in half. It's pure fluff but quite handsomely made fluff, especially in the last act where the Technicolor cinematography produces some surprisingly lush images (the seance, Houdini under the ice). Honestly, despite my low ratings for them, this kind of easily digestible picture is among my favorites from Hollywood's classic era. It shows how polished the machinery of this system really could be even in some of its discarded films and how hard the smaller studios worked to match this kind of easy charm.