His career really takes off after he meets Jim Collins (Evan Jones, "Criminal Minds") who becomes his assistant and, more important, the gifted craftsman and inventor of Houdini's various devices, including the famous Chinese Water Torture tank. Despite his marriage and professional partnership to former showgirl Bess Rahner (Kristen Connolly, "House of Cards"), he regularly cheats on her, perhaps not so much for sexual satisfaction but because it's another form of putting himself in danger. Houdini is equally driven in his personal life as well, however. The film, written by Nicholas Meyer ("The Informant") and directed by Uli Edel ("The Mists of Avalon"), repeatedly suggests psychological forces prompted Houdini to keep pushing himself toward more and more dangerous tricks, without really offering much of a reason why.
Even if he was able to secret tiny tools into the famous Chinese Water Torture trick, his life was legitimately on the line if he wasn't able to escape quickly enough.
Nonetheless, that doesn't detract from our understanding of how skillfully Houdini was able to hold his audience spellbound. Although Houdini's audience may have suspended disbelief, Houdini is insistent that he does not perform actual magic - it's all just trickery.
The film follows Weiss/Houdini from his birth in Budapest, to his relocation with parents and brothers to the United States, where his father became the rabbi of a Jewish congregation in Wisconsin but was essentially fired, according to the film, because he couldn't speak English.Īlready fascinated by magic to the point of obsession, young Erich (Louis Mertens) begins performing rudimentary tricks on street corners and earning money from passersby, which he brings home to his adored mother (Eszter Ónodi, "Valami America").įrom the outset, "Houdini" takes pains to explain how every illusion and escape works. 1 and 2, with Adrien Brody ("The Pianist") in the title role. But he lives again in a two-night, four-hour biopic on the History Channel, airing Sept. Harry Houdini escaped death time and time again, only to die of peritonitis and a ruptured appendix at 52 in 1926.
Perhaps the greatest stunt Erich Weiss ever pulled off was that nearly 90 years after his death, his stage name, Houdini, is still the virtual definition for "the greatest escape artist of all time."
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