Trailer
Plot summary
At a Coney Island carnival in the 1890s, Harry Houdini performs as the wild man Bruto and as the magician The Great Houdini. A young woman named Bess steps in when Schultz, who trains him in the act, appears to strike him; Harry later calls her up from the audience. She flees his flirting, comes back to watch him twice more, and tells him she is drawn to him. They marry and move in with his mother, and Bess joins him on stage as the act tours. The pay is poor and the travel hard, so she talks him into testing locks at a factory, where the big safes fascinate him. At a magicians' dinner on Halloween he frees himself from a straitjacket, and the magician Fante urges him to quit magic.
Cast
- Malcolm Lee Beggsas British Jail Warden
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Houdini (1953)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- When Paramount bought the life story of Harry Houdini in 1951 for producer George Pal, the columnist Hedda Hopper suggested Orson Welles, himself a practicing magician, as the ideal star for the film.
- Houdini was the first film to put Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh on screen together; the two stars were married to each other at the time.
- Tony Curtis suffered ice burns sitting in a bathtub full of ice for one of the escape scenes, according to his co-star and wife Janet Leigh.
- Tony Curtis trained for a month with the magician George Boston and Joe Dunninger handled the illusions; Janet Leigh said the tricks were learned for real, so Curtis's levitation of her needed no cuts or camera trickery.
- The escape scenes had to be faked, Janet Leigh said, because Tony Curtis could not contort his body or work locks the way the real Houdini could.
- Houdini was originally going to be shot in black-and-white, but during pre-production the decision was made to film it in Technicolor to show off the costumes and sets.
