The Master Mystery
“The
graveyard of genius”, International Patents, Inc. “A terrible
engine of destruction,” the mechanical man with a human brain,
“Q”, it puts out all the lights with a fist to the fuse box, and
breaks into the girl’s room as she retreats ahead of Broken Blossoms (dir. D.W. Griffith)
“Believe it
or not, I have been in Madagascar and I know!” The other arm of the
Corporation’s wrath is a laughing gas that induces “the Madagascar
madness” by means of burning candles, therewith the girl’s
conscience-stricken father, head of the firm, is rendered a mental case, and
whilst attempting to rescue him a government agent is unlawfully placed in a lunatic
restraint.
Houdini as Locke,
Department of Justice, working undercover, handily taking apart an umbrella for
a picklock to save the day... arrested on a false charge, he is handcuffed,
with prestidigitator’s hands he frees himself to read a letter fallen to
the floor and in a trice is handcuffed again, unnoticed. “Were you in
Madagascar recently?”
“Certainly,
I cruised through Mozambique Channel and touched at Madagascar last
summer.”
“Episode
Two, The Iron Terror”.
Edgar Allan Poe,
another great authority on bunkum, is practically cited on the subject of
automata. A masterwork aptly named. Strung up by his wrists, Locke throttles a
thug with his legs, fetches out the keys from the fellow’s coat pocket
with his feet and uses them to open a facing door with his toes, placing his
legs across the top edge he unknots one rope with his teeth and is quickly
free, all for the camera’s benefit in a fine medium shot (the underwater
escape is not well seen in Kino’s incomplete restoration “by
special arrangement with the George Eastman House”, a number of magnificent
scenes are missing but described in titles).
The bold
construction advances a phony rival for the girl’s voting interest in the
company, a supposed by-blow of her father’s brought up by “Old
Meg—A Teller of Tales”. Several very nasty close escapes are
interrupted by the end of an episode. The source is Shakespeare (The Tempest or Pericles, Prince of Tyre).
“In my
country his magic is supreme.” The Great Torture in a temple of the
Chinese underworld. Hans J. Wollstein (All Movie Guide) believes Houdini
“escaped his many perils too easily,” he did not. Describing an
escape filmed in the asylum sequence of The
Man From Beyond, Houdini wrote, “several times I have had barely
enough strength to walk off the stage after it was over.”
The Man From Beyond
“Then came the crushing realisation that
while time had stood still for him, it had swept away everyone near and
dear—that the girl before him was a total stranger.”
Failure of an
Arctic expedition, discovery of the title character (Harry Houdini) immured a
century.
And there is the
girl, about to be married, and her absconded father. “An instinct, too
subtle to explain, tells me that we are not strangers. Don’t you feel
that too, Felice?” And so by
degrees to Robbe-Grillet’s L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (dir. Alain Resnais). Ken Russell
certainly recalls the first sight of the icebound face “frozen in a snarl
of hate” and the escape from a New York insane asylum in Altered States.
Jane Connelly the
girl, a charge of murder, Nita Naldi a conspirator.
The point of it all is precisely recalled by Hitchcock in Family Plot, secret kidnapping cell, forced injection averted, and
of course the fight above a national monument provides the meaning, the canoe
goes over the falls...
In this sense, Bride of Frankenstein (dir. James Whale)
is a most astute commentary.
It ends according
to Doyle, one of the great works of the cinema, remembered en route in Pichel & Holden’s She.
To say it was
lost on the New York Times is to say
it was reviewed there, “Mr. Houdini's imagination seems to have run out
at the inception of his idea... Mr. Houdini also appears in person to perform
in his usual manner. He causes a girl and an elephant to disappear and gets out
of a straitjacket. He also appears to swallow four packages of needles, several
yards of thread and a drink of water, after which the thread is pulled out of
his mouth with the needles strung on it. This trick is mystifying.”