Movie Monday: The Big Clock

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1948 film noir The Big Clock!
 

The Big Clock stars Ray Milland, Maureen O'Sullivan, George MacReady, plus real-life couple Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. Milland plays a man named George Stroud who, as the film opens, seems to be on the run from the law. He's hiding in the darkness from a security guard, narrowly escaping being found:

How, as Stroud narrates, did he get here? When, just 24 hours earlier, he was an upstanding member of society, a successful magazine editor for the mammoth company known as Janoth Publications:

This is the clock in question, an absurdly grand construction that sits in the middle of the lobby of the Janoth building, dwarfing the human figures that move around it. As a tour guide explains, you can learn what time it is anywhere in the world thanks to this clock, which was built specifically from instructions by Earl Janoth himself (Charles Laughton).

Stroud has been working for Janoth for a few years, and has had a meteoric rise. So meteoric that he and his wife (O'Sullivan) haven't had a proper honeymoon, even though they already have a small child! Stroud has to put in one last day before he goes on an oft-delayed vacation:

There's a fun sequence in the Janoth elevator, where in one unbroken shot we see people get on and get off different floors. Not only does it give us an overview of just how big Janoth Publications is (it seems to publish dozens of glossy, high-end magazines, covering all sorts of subjects), but its a fun visual trick, thanks to some nice back-screen projection. (Nerd Bonus: TV Lois Lane Noel Neill plays the elevator operator!)

Stroud runs a true crime magazine, and has been a whiz at finding bad guys even before the police. There's currently a suspect on the run, and Stroud assigns his staff to look into the case.

 

Meanwhile, there's a meeting held by all the magazine editors, and by Janoth himself:

This is Laughton's first scene, and he comes in and destroys the place. Janoth is a rude, condescending, arrogant tool, the worst kind of boss imaginable: he shoots down people's ideas, talks over them, and belittles them in front of the others. He's a total delight to watch, and Laughton seems to be having the time of his life playing such a dick.

Janoth talks privately with Stroud, demanding that he take up the new case personally, delaying his honeymoon yet again. Janoth fires Stroud, right on the spot, even saying he'll blackball him in the industry. Stroud doesn't seem to care, accepts Janoth's decision, and leaves.

On his way out, Stroud runs into Janoth's mistress Pauline York (Rita Johnson), and they go out drinking, so much so that Stroud misses the train he was supposed to take with his family to their vacation spot. Now a little tipsy, Stroud and York take a liquid tour of Manhattan, at one point stopping in an antique store buying a painting of two hands holding a clock, right out from under another buyer, a dotty lady played Elsa Lanchester.

Stroud and York go to her apartment, and Janoth sees a man leaving later in the night, not realizing it's his former employee. Janoth confronts his mistress, who mocks him to his face, leading this titan of industry to commit cold-blooded murder.

I don't want to say any more about the plot of The Big Clock, because there are more surprises to come. There's a bunch of great character performances, like George MacReady (Paths of Glory) as Janoth's oily second-hand-man, plus Harry Morgan (again!) as Janoth's seemingly-mute (he never utters a word) masseuse and all-around goon:

Morgan's character lurks around the edges of the movie, seemingly always in the background, glowering. He's a blast to watch, because he's a hired gun trying to blend in among all these high-end magazine types, and he sticks out like a sore thumb.

Also wonderful in the movie is Elsa Lanchester, as a starving artist who is a key to the whole case that develops around the murder. We meet her again at her small apartment, which is littered with kids, all from different fathers/husbands:

She and her husband only have one scene together, where they are at odds; I can only imagine how much fun they had doing it.

 

Eventually, the noose tightens around the people involved, leading to a violent conclusion (which the poster partly gives away, thanks Paramount marketing department) and a reminder that you should always watch your step around elevator shafts.

Anyway, I heartily recommend The Big Clock to any film noir fan. It's a load of fun, filled with great performances, nice twists and turns, and great sets--in these days of magazines and newspapers withering away to extinction, the movie made me nostalgic for a time I personally never experienced, when working for a magazine meant you got to go to work in mile-high, gleaming skyscrapers that looked like they came right out of Metropolis. It all looks so fabulous and glamorous, even with all the murders!

The Big Clock was suggested for Movie Monday by my Ace Kilroy partner Dan O'Connor. Thanks Dan!

 

Movie Monday: The Lineup

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1958 film noir The Lineup!
 
Like last week's Foreign Intrigue, The Lineup is a movie that sprung from a TV series, which ran from 1954-1960. A sort of Law & Order of its day, The Lineup focused on the procedural aspect of cops n'robbers, though as we'll see, the producers decided to ramp things up a notch when going to the silver screen.

The film opens with a slam-bang pre-credits sequence: a porter unloading passenger cargo from a ship tosses a suitcase into a waiting cab, which speeds off. The driver panics and slams into a police officer trying to stop him, and then crashes into a steel post. Its over the crumbled car that the credits roll.

Two police detectives, Lt. Ben Guthrie (Warner Anderson, who appeared on the show) and Insp. Al Quine (Emile Meyer) investigate, and learn that a ring of heroin smugglers are now using innocent travelers as "mules"--stashing the drugs in their luggage and then retrieving them once they've arrived in San Francisco. The case they are investigating concerns some Oriental art brought back to America by a collector:

They have the man sit in front of a, yes, lineup, made up of porters, but the man cannot identify any of them as the one who stole his suitcase. Soon, the porter in question turns up dead.

The syndicate, worried about other shipments being intercepted, send experts to make sure the drugs are picked up successfully, two men named Dancer (Eli Wallach) and Julian (Robert Keith):

It's here, with the introduction of these two characters, that The Lineup really comes alive. Wallach's Dancer is a twitchy psychopath, insecure but with a hair trigger. Keith's Julian seems to be there just to keep Dancer from going completely off the rails, and their dynamic suggests just the slightest hint of a homosexual relationship. But of course that's left to the audience's imagination...

Dancer goes to pick up the shipments, and ends up killing anyone who gets in his way:

The third package came in with a single mother and her daughter, and Dancer has to try and pick the woman up so they can go back to her hotel together. Dancer has just enough charm, playing on the woman's insecurity about being alone, that she goes along with him and Julian.

Its at their hotel that they discover that the young daughter stumbled upon the drugs and, not knowing what they were, used them as make-up powder for her doll. Dancer flies into a rage, seemingly ready to kill both women, but Julian realizes that their bosses will never believe such a story, so they go against orders and meet with "The Man" (Vaughn Taylor) and explain what happened.

But of course it all goes wrong: "The Man" doesn't believe Dancer, and slaps him in the face. Dancer goes Coo-Coo for Cocoa-Puffs and pushes the wheelchair-bound man off a platform onto a skating rink below, in full view of dozens of bystanders:

Dancer, Julian, and their boozed-up driver McLain (Richard Jaeckel) take the women on a chase from the police, along the as-yet-completed highway system, which almost ends up with them dropping off a sheer cliff. With the cops on their tail, Dancer shoots Julian and grabs the little girl, using her as a human shield. But when he tries to jump from one overpass to the next, a policeman's bullet finds him, and he plummets to the ground, his body smashing into several concrete slabs on the way down.

The Lineup is extraordinary fun--tense and well-shot (it was directed by Don Siegel), its filled with great performances and some wonderful sequences set amid various San Francisco landmarks (the scene with The Man takes place at Sutro Baths, an indoor amusement park and pool, which burned down in 1966). If you're a fan of the City by the Bay, as I am, seeing what it looked like circa the mid-1950s really adds to the enjoyment of the film.

The police are fairly dull, nondescript characters, and even though they are in the very final scene of the movie they don't even get any dialog! Its clear the moviemakers knew that once Dancer buys it, the movie was over. Speaking of, Wallach and Keith make a great pair; the latter ever-so-slightly condescends to his high-strung partner; at first you wonder why he's even on this trip since Dancer does all the heavy lifting. Then it becomes clear that without someone to rein him in, Dancer is the kind of guy who would probably walk into police headquarters and start shooting after getting a ticket for jaywalking. For my money, I would have loved to have seen a prequel or something to The Lineup, featuring these two having more adventures. Nasty, nasty adventures.

Fun Fact: Keith has a scene with Jaeckel where he says this line of dialogue: "When you live outside the law, you must eliminate dishonesty", which was appropriated by no less than Bob Dylan for his 1966 song "Absolutely Sweet Marie", where he sings "To live outside the law, you must be honest." I get a chuckle thinking about then-17-year-old Bobby Zimmerman, sitting in a Hibbing, Minnesota movie theater watching The Lineup, and that line burrowing its way into his fertile brain. I wonder if Bob ever sent screenwriter Stirling Silliphant a copy of Blonde on Blonde?

Movie Monday: Foreign Intrigue

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1956 thriller Foreign Intrigue!
 
Foreign Intrigue is another one of those movies that I had never heard of until I saw it on Netflix WI. But it starred Robert Mitchum, was in full color (unusual for the time), and the poster is aces. How could I go wrong?

The film opens with millionaire Victor Danemore (Jean Galland) leisurely strolling his estate when he has a massive heart attack, dropping him to the floor. Moments later, Danemore's publicist, Dave Bishop (Mitchum) visits and finds him, and is the last to see him alive.

Everything seems fairly normal, until we learn that Bishop knows almost nothing about his employer. It turns out that Danemore was a mysterious figure, and hired Bishop to basically create a public persona for him, out of nothing. Bishop decides to investigate, but no one seems to know anything about the man--including his wife Dominique (Genevieve Page), who seems to have barely any reaction upon hearing her husband has died:

Bishop is repeatedly approached by various shady figures, all of whom want to know the same thing: what did Danemore say, if anything, before he died? The more Bishop is asked this question, the more he investigates as to why so many strangers seem to care.

One of the more persistent is Jonathan Spring (Frederic O'Brady), who seems to keep falling just short of threatening Bishop:

There is a lot of talking in Foreign Intrigue. A lot. In fact, except for one brief punch thrown by Mitchum (at O'Brady), there are no action scenes in the movies at all. Bishop meets another woman named Mrs. Lindquist (Ingrid Thulin) who he seems attracted to. They're all involved with Danemore, and Bishop learns that his former boss was blackmailing different people who were once Nazis, all of whom were of course desperate to keep that little part of their lives under wraps.

There's a fairly neat scene of a bunch of guys meeting with Bishop in a sort of subterranean vault, where the truth about Danemore's dealings come out. Unfortunately, by this point the plothas gotten so complicated, with so many characters double-dealing, that I was pretty confused as to what the hell was going on.

The film ends on an odd note, with Bishop and Spring meeting up again and heading off together, talking of further adventures they're going to have but of course we'll never see:

...not The End?


Foreign Intrigue is a supremely strange film. It feels like its setting up to be a fairly standard Europe-hopping film noir, but the pace is so relaxed that there's never much of a feeling of menace or danger to Bishop. The main bad guy, if he can be called that, is O'Brady as Jonathan Spring, but even after their brief action scene, they're back to joking around with one another. The guys threatening Bishop are okay enough, but this is Robert Mitchum we're talking about--it takes a lot to make it seem like he's in danger. And these slightly nerdy Euro guys just can't pull it off.

Another odd element is the music--there's very little in the film, except for this bossanova-type thing, which is used over and over, and it cuts whatever little tension is to be found in the movie. There are scenes of Mitchum draped in deep shadows, which look great, but then there's a moment of silence and the music kicks in, bringing the scene to a dead stop.

The film was directed, written, and produced by Sheldon Reynolds, who was simultaneously producing a syndicated TV series of the same name. It ran from 1951-1955, and apparently part of its appeal was its real European settings, which of course were still fairly novel in the era just before mass air travel. Foreign Intrigue the movie provides a lot of beautiful scenery as well, and I'm sure Mitchum had a blast making this movie. But I feel like a documentary following Bob around while shooting might have produced something a little more compelling.

 

Movie Monday: Captain Nemo and the Underwater City

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1959 fantasy adventure Captain Nemo and The Underwater City!
 
A few days ago I went to a screening of one of my all-time favorite movies, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, part of a series of classic films shown every week at the Cinemark theater chain. I had never seen the movie on the big screen before, and I just loved it. I'm a sucker for any Jules Verne-esque story of underwater monsters, amazing machines, secret cities, etc. Of course, the Disney version of Leagues remains the gold standard for all such adaptations, but the 1954 film was neither the first or nor last appearance of Captain Nemo in the movies.

Case in point: the ungainly-titled Captain Nemo and the Underwater City, a British production with a unusual tough-guy cast: the two main leads are Robert Ryan and Chuck Connors!

The film opens with a ship being violently tossed by a massive storm. It gets so bad that the lifeboats are deployed and everyone is ordered off. Unfortunately, a handful of passengers end up in the drink, where they are sure to die. Except--they are rescued by a team of people in high-tech scuba suits! Six people are brought on board an amazing underwater craft. One of them, Senator Robert Fraser (Connors), is introduced to the ship's commander: Captain Nemo (Ryan):

Nemo explains to Fraser that he and the others are aboard the Nautilus, a ship of enormous power and technology, build by Nemo and his people, many of whom reside in an underewater domed city known as Templemir:

Templemir seems like a paradise its filled with peaceful people who read, play, eat, and frolic:

Two of the surface dwellers, a young woman named Helena (Nanette Newman) and her young son Phillip (Christopher Hartstone) seem to take to their new surroundings immediately. Two brothers, Barnaby and Swallow Bath (Bill Fraser and Kenneth Connor) also like Templemir, but for an entirely different reason: the city is filled with gold! Gold is a natural by-product of the food mining that the citizens of Templemir do to feed themselves, so them gold is essentially worthless. But the Bath Brothers see an opportunity. 

The one person not happy with all this is Lomax (Allen Cuthbertson), who finds living under the water a claustrophobic nightmare and desperately wants to return to the surface.

We get to see some of the daily operations of Templemir (featuring some unfortunately silly costumes, as you can see above). Nemo is a gruff but essentially kind host; he offers his visitors the opportunity to stay in perpetuity.

Lomax is having none of it--he decides to try and steal some scuba gear and escape, which fails. He then goes a little bughouse by trying to sabotage Templemir's life-support system, which only ends up flooding the room Lomax is in. Nemo, having had enough, seals off the room, which saves Templemir and also consigns Lomax to a watery death:

The Bath Brothers, also determined to escape, attempt to steal a second sub, the Nautilus II. They are not trusted by Nemo or his second in command Joab (John Turner), so they rope in Fraser in their plan. Fraser wants to leave as well, so he befriends Nemo and learns how to pilot the Nautilus. Its during this training we meet Mobula, a manta-like creature accidentally created during the building of Templemir.

Fraser tells Nemo he wants to leave, but Nemo, fearful his world will be discovered, refuses to let him go. In an attempt to keep him, Nemo offers Fraser a role in the running of Templemir, and the other cities under construction. This doesn't sit well with Joab, who is worried about being replaced, both by Nemo and the woman he and Fraser both like, the comely Mala (Luciana Paluzzi, from Thunderball). Joab offers to help Fraser and the Bath Brothers escape.

Unfortunately, it doesn't all go as planned, and only Fraser and Swallow survive to make it to the surface:

They are picked up by a ship, where they tell their story about an undersea city, which is met with incredulous laughter. It appears Nemo and Templemir will remain a secret after all!


Captain Nemo and the Underwater City is a fairly fun movie--I mean, how could it not be?--but it's made up such individual weak parts that it never really congeals into something truly remarkable. Robert Ryan seems miscast as Nemo--he's more grumpy than driven, and I can only imagine what he thought when putting on the ridiculous costumes he's forced to wear. Chuck Conners is okay as Fraser, but he seems like a warmed-over version of Kirk Douglas from the Disney film. The two Bath Brothers are by far the weakest part of the movie, however--they practically have Comic Relief stamped on their foreheads, and the even get their own "wacky" music motif on the soundtrack. I feel like the movie stops dead every time they do their schtick.

My favorite part of the movie is the scene with Lomax as he tries to sabotage Templemir--it's got some nice grit to it, and it's well executed (no pun intended). The stuff with the irradiated manta ray is interesting, but it seems more like a distraction from the main story, like they really didn't want to pursue it too far. I would have enjoyed Nemo fighting more giant sea creatures, myself!

Apparently David Fincher, of all people, is keen to remake 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, which is not a sentence I'd ever thought I'd type. No matter how that film turns out, I'm just happy knowing that Captain Nemo will be returning the movies again soon!

Movie Monday: The Legend of the Lone Ranger

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1981 mega-bomb The Legend of the Lone Ranger!
 
With the big-budget Lone Ranger "reboot" (with Johnny Depp as Tonto) on the way, it reminded me of the last time Hollywood tried the Lone Ranger story, the infamous 1981 movie starring the unfortunately named Klinton Spilsbury. I didn't see it as a kid, so I had zero memory of it; is it bad as everyone says?

The film opens with the Lone Ranger (John Reid) and Tonto as young boys. Reid's family is killed, so he is taken in and raised by a Comanche tribe, and grows up with Tonto as his surrogate brother.

Flash forward a decade or two, and Reid is traveling with his lone relative, his older brother Dan--who is now a Texas Ranger--along with the rest of the Rangers when they are ambushed by the Cavendish Gang. All the Rangers are killed, and the younger Reid nursed back to health by his old friend Tonto. Reid declares revenge against Cavendish (Christopher Lloyd) and his gang by donning a mask and becoming...The Lone Ranger!

It turns out that Cavendish has grander plans than just robbing stagecoaches and stealing land...he plans to kidnap visiting President Ulysses S. Grant (Jason Robards) and hold him for ransom. He wants part of Texas declared a sovreign state (oh, how things have changed) and will return Grant only if his wishes are...um, granted (sorry).

While Cavendish squirrels Grant away (where they play pool together, with Grant even amending Cavendish's ransom note to make it more effective), the Lone Ranger finds and tames his horse, Silver, find where Cavendish is hiding the president, and sneak in to make their daring rescue. It ends with President Grant congratulating the masked man, who promises to continue to quest to fight for justice!

The Legend of the Lone Ranger is barely more than 90 minutes long. I am normally a fan of letting things build, but it takes the movie way, way, too long to get to the creation of the titular hero...it's almost an hour into the movie before we finally see him don the mask, and by then we've only got about a half hour left! I wouldn't be surprised if they had shot a much longer, Superman The Movie-esque epic, only to trim it way down when it became clear they probably had a turkey on their hands.

Speaking of post-production meddling, the most famous piece of trivia to come out of this movie is that the lead actor, Klinton Spilsbury (oh, that name!) had his entire performance dubbed over by actor James Keach. We have no idea what Spilsbury sounded like--he's pretty much disappeared from the public eye ever since--but never once hearing the actual performance adds a really odd, discordant note to the whole thing.

That said, I have to say The Legend of the Lone Ranger isn't all that terrible, certainly not as bad as its reputation suggests. Christopher Lloyd makes a particularly nasty villain (a nice companion piece to his role as Kruge in Star Trek III, just a year or two after this), and the scenery is nice. The plot involving Ulysses S. Grant is kinda cool, and the retrofitted relationship between the Lone Ranger and Tonto works well.

There is an ongoing "Ballad of the Lone Ranger"-type song, sung by Merle Haggard, that is awful, and its sheer cheesiness at times makes the movie feel like an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard. The main love interest, Amy Striker, (played by Juanin Clay) is a dud, so every time the film veers in that direction you're itching for them to drop all this boring mushy stuff and get back to the silver bullets, dammit! Luckily she's not in it all that much (unlike Tarzan The Ape Man, released the same year, which pushes the hero to the side for the sake of the love interest).

The soundtrack, once Reid dons the mask, uses the classic Lone Ranger theme--a lot. I totally appreciate the insistence on using it, since it's so iconic, but it doesn't fit well with the film, which has a fair amount of bloody violence (perhaps Sam Peckinpah was brought in for reshoots!). Also, over the end credits there's a repeat of what sounds like narration from the Lone Ranger radio show; again, it sits uneasily with the finished film.

Obviously the studio thought The Legend of the Lone Ranger was going to be a huge hit; there was an action figure line that was advertised on the back of comic books for what seemed like a year. But the film was pretty much DOA, leaving the stink of failure on the masked man for decades. I guess we'll see if he has better luck next year.

Movie Monday: Houdini

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1953 bio-pic Houdini!
 
Paramount went all out for this portrait of the legendary magician, springing for color photography and big stars:

The film opens at a circus, where young Bess (Janet Leigh) is with her girlfriends, enjoying the attractions. When they see the wild beast man, Bess pipes up, decrying the cruelty with which he is treated by the carnival barker.

Later, Bess wanders away from her friends, and makes the wild beast man's acquaintance:

Of course, the wild beast man isn't a real "missing link"; rather, he's Harry Houdini, an aspiring magician who appears in disguise for the opportunity to go on stage with his illusions, which don't attract much of a crowd:

 

Bess departs, but when she comes back to the circus, it's clear that Houdini is smitten with her. As he lays strapped to a table, headed for certain death via buzzsaw, all he can do is look longingly at Bess, as she watches, horrified, from the crowd:

 

Eventually Houdini and Bess get together, and get married, living in a small apartment with his mother. Bess becomes his on-stage assistant, but it doesn't take long before she tires of the grind--the endless travel, the low pay, and the rough crowds. At one point an audience member hurls something at Houdini, only for the magician to reappear, as if by magic, in the crowd, where he exacts some revenge on the heckler:

Eventually Bess convinces Harry to quit the life, and he gets a job at a safe factory, where he is bored, working on the assembly line. The only thing that keeps him involved is the work of another man at the factory, an old hand who brags of crafting uncrackable safes. Houdini offers to be locked inside, just to see if he can escape, but is gruffly rebuffed.

On Halloween Night, Houdini and Bess go to dinner at a fancy hotel, which just happens to be holding a banquet for a club of magicians. An offer is made for five members of the audience to try and escape from unbeatable strait-jackets. Bess tries, and fails, to keep her husband in his seat, but of course destiny calls:

As the four other magicians struggle, flopping around the stage, Houdini stays still. He focuses on a glowing ball dangling from chandelier, and begins to sweat profusely. Bess looks concerned, as done the head magician. Seconds tick by, and Houdini frees himself from the strait-jacket, almost as if he was in a trance. The prize is two tickets to Europe, but they come with a warning: Houdini is told by the head magician to stop pursuing this new line of illusions; that it might be dangerous.

Houdini ignores this, and after a brief fight he and Bess go to Europe. Houdini tries to track down a master magician named Von Schweiger. He is told by the man's assistant, Otto (Torin Thatcher) that the great man died just a few days earlier. Otto decides to become Houdini's assistant and travel with him and Bess.

During one series of sold-out shows, Houdini is challenged to break out of an English jail cell, considered impossible to escape from. He takes up the challenge, and while he makes his escape, we see Bess pretend to be Houdini on stage, giving the real man time to get to the stage, stunning everyone:

They return to America, where Houdini's fame grows. His tricks grow ever more dangerous, like being dropped into the icy waters of the Detroit River while being locked in a box. Things go wrong when a cable snaps, dropping him into the river before he is ready, and Houdini barely escapes with his life, lost beneath the ice, desperately looking for a hole to the surface.

When reunited with Bess, he tells her the only way he found his way out was following the voice of his mother--who he learns, died at almost that exact same moment, many miles away. It's at this point Houdini becomes obsessed with communicating with "the other side", which of course would be the ultimate trick.

Two years pass (where, strangely, Houdini and Bess seemed to have aged by more than a decade), and in that time we learn through a reporter that all Houdini has been doing, in lieu of stage appearances, is trying to find someone who can truly communicate with the dead. They go to visit a medium, who seems to be the real thing:

Of course, it doesn't take long (mere moments, in fact) for Houdini to reveal the woman to be a fraud--all the ghostly goings-on are faked. Houdini's quest continues.

He returns to performing, looking to perfect the "Water Torture" escape, which worries Bess to no end. One night, on Halloween, Houdini feels ill, suffering from appendicitis. He ignores the pain, and goes on with the show--but something goes wrong, and Otto must free Houdini from the tank:

Bess rushes to the stage, where Houdini, about to die, promises that, if he can, he will come back. As Bess sobs, the camera pans on a poster of The Great Houdini. The End.



Houdini is a lot of fun; it's fairly well acted--Curtis is a bit of a cipher as Houdini, but Leigh is great, and they have a lot of chemistry (no surprise, they were a real life couple off screen when this movie was made). The film is nice to look at, and gives us the inside scoop on how Houdini pulled off some of his tricks (though not all; a nice touch). Historically, it takes a lot of liberties with real story; Houdini didn't die on stage--it was that infamous punch to the gut, combined with the appendicitis, that slowly killed him a few days later. But dying on stage is very dramatic, and I guess the movie makers thought it was just too good to resist, ending the movie like it began--on stage.

Other than the seance scene, the movie doesn't do a whole lot, visually, with the whole world of magic. The film was directed by George Marshall, who did a lot of "B" comedies and thrillers, and (later) TV work; it's kind of a shame Paramount didn't get someone with a little more flair to tackle this story--Orson Welles comes to mind.

Still, Houdini is a solid classic Hollywood biopic; it's kind of amazing there's never been another version of this story done in the sixty years since the film came out; it's seems like such ripe subject matter. Until that time, though, Houdini does the job.