If you’re looking for a completely factual biography of Houdini, you’ll have to look elsewhere. The blows aggravated the escape artist’s appendicitis, and he died of a ruptured appendix and peritonitis.īiopics reached their zenith in the 1950s, when the public romanticized their heroes and celebrities and were perfectly content to have filmmakers do the same. The real Houdini lived to be 52 and died, ironically, not from any of his dangerous stunts-which included escaping from inside locked safes and chained boxes lowered into water-but from gut punches administered by a cocky college student who had heard Houdini had an iron stomach. The film also captures Houdini’s obsession with giving the audience bigger and more death-defying stunts, including one in which he was hung upside down from the roof of a skyscraper as he wriggled free of a straitjacket and chains. This film does a great job capturing the carnivalesque nature of vaudeville and the fame that Houdini found in Europe, where he made headlines by breaking out of a Scotland Yard jail. Harry Houdini was the most famous magician and escape artist in the world during his lifetime and through the 1950s, when this Technicolor period biopic was made.

In this film, Harry and Bess’s meet-cute courtship is the stuff of romantic comedies, and there are plenty of laughs as she joins his act and they go from playing West Virginia vaudeville houses to performing in front of packed crowds at the best opera houses in Europe. Hollywood legend Tony Curtis gives one of his best performances in Houdini, a colorful biography set in the 1890s through the 1920s, and he does it playing opposite his then-wife Janet Leigh when they were still relative newlyweds.

Houdini movie tony curtis