Houdini (1953)

Houdini may not have a great deal to do with the actual life and career of Harry Houdini but it’s wonderful entertainment nonetheless, mostly due to Tony Curtis’s dazzling performance.

We begin with the young Harry Houdini, eking out a living in carnival sideshows but with grandiose ambitions. His attempts to romance Bess (Janet Leigh) seem doomed to failure but if something seems impossible Hioudini simply sees it as a challenge to overcome. He wins Bess but he’s still a distinctly small-time magician.

And now he has a wife who would really prefer him to have a regular job. He gives in and gets a job at a safe factory but he is never going to give up his dreams. His big chance comes at a magicians’ Halloween dinner when he accepts a challenge to escape from a straitjacket. The prize being offered is quite substantial because no-one has ever succeeded in escaping from a straitjacket before. Harry of course succeeds.

Now the Great Houdinis (as the husband-and-wife act is now called) are off to Europe. Houdini’s greatest single challenge was to persuade Bess to agree to such a gamble and although he convinced her she was still less than enthusiastic.

Houdini’s career almost crashes in London when he accepts a challenge to escape from an English prison. What he doesn’t know is that this English prison has a security system quite different from an American prison. It really is escape-proof. Or at least it was escape-proof until Houdini came along.

Houdini achieves success in Europe but finds he has to start all over again when he returns to the US. By this time however he has perfected the art of the publicity stunt and he is soon an even bigger star in his home country.

Of course he has to keep coming up with ever more spectacular tricks. And ever more dangerous escapes. How long can a man keep defying death?

Whether the real Houdini was a man half in love with death is debatable but his film counterpart certainly seems to be. Of course a movie has to have some kind of theme and in this case it’s Houdini’s determination to go on taunting death.

Janet Leigh gives a fine performance in difficult circumstances - the difficulty being that the  screenplay can’t make up its mind whether Bess is to be a supportive wife or whether she is to be the kind of wife who thwarts her husband at every opportunity. As a result Leigh has to change gears constantly and we never really get a handle on what makes Bess tick.

It’s Tony Curtis’s performance that really matters and he’s superb. To be a totally convincing Houdini an actor has to have plenty of charisma and has to convey a sense of being constantly driven by ambition. Curtis certainly has the charisma and that driven quality was something he was particularly good at (see his performances in Sweet Smell of Success and Trapeze). He also has the ability to make such a character both sympathetic and likeable.

Director George Marshall doesn’t try anything fancy. He doesn’t need to do - the story is colourful enough, he has two charismatic stars and to add cinematic trickery to the magic tricks would just cheapen them. The best approach was the one Marshall chose - just point the camera at Tony Curtis and let him do his stuff. Philip Yordan’s screenplay is rather disjointed. Mostly it seems to be an excuse to string together a series of Houdini’s most celebrated magic tricks. Oddly enough it’s an approach that works quite well. The focus is mainly on Houdini’s career rather than his personal life, which is just as well because whenever the focus does switch to his personal life the movie gets a lot less interesting.

Houdini has had several DVD releases and is available on Blu-Ray from Legend Films (paired rather incongruously with Those Daring Young Men in their Jaunty Jalopies). The Blu-Ray transfer is not terrific but it’s acceptable.

It’s probably better to consider this as a movie inspired by the life of Houdini rather than as an attempt to give us any kind of insight into the great magician’s actual life. If you’re prepared to accept that then there’s plenty to enjoy here. Tony Curtis gives one of his career-best performances and the chemistry between Curtis and Leigh is terrific. Even if it takes extreme liberties with the truth Houdini is perhaps the right kind of movie tribute to the greatest magician of them all, magic being all about illusion after all. Highly recommended.

Young Winston (1972)

Young Winston is an old-fashioned biopic. If such a movie were to be made today it would be a hatchet job. Larger-than-life heroes like Churchill are out of fashion. Richard Attenborough is quite content simply to present us with what is largely Churchill’s own version of his early life, and let us make up our own minds. We see Churchill’s flaws - his excessive ambition, his political ruthlessness, his glory-seeking. And we see his strengths - his conviction of his own destiny, his courage, his determination to succeed. Attenborough doesn’t try to tell us what we should think of Churchill. Whether that is a plus or a minus depends on your point of view.

Even in 1972 when it was released this was an old-fashioned movie, quite different from a movie like Patton. And at the time this was seen as a weakness. Today, to audiences grown tired of being bludgeoned by message pictures, it seems more like a virtue.

Churchill’s early life was so colourful that it would have been difficultif not impossible to make this a dull film. The young Churchill saw action on the Northwest Frontier of India with the Malakand Field Force, he saw further service in the Sudan under Lord Kitchener (where he participated in the charge of the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898) and then went to South Africa as a war correspondent, covering the Boer War for the Morning Post.



In South Africa he found fame. He was always anxious to be where the action was, not from an excess of courage so much as from a desperate need for material. Although born into the aristocracy (he was the grandson of the 7th Duke of Marlborough and a direct descendant of England’s greatest general, the 1st Duke of Marlborough) Churchill had to support himself from his writing. He managed to be on the scene when a British armoured train was ambushed, was captured and then escaped. His adventures became front page news.

The movie gives us plenty of spectacular action sequences but it is just as interested in its hero’s early attempts to forge a political career. Churchill’s father had been a prominent Tory Cabinet Minister but managed to destroy his own career. Young Winston was determined not to make the same mistake.



For Churchill war was a means of gaining fame, a springboard to political success. He was always quite open about this. His father Lord Randolph had alienated himself from his colleagues and being his son was more of handicap than an advantage to an aspiring politician, and his mother had managed to lose most of the family’s money. The young Churchill needed to make a name for himself, and he set about doing so.

The movie possibly puts too much emphasis on Winston’s relationships with his parents although this does give Robert Shaw as Lord Randolph and Anne Bancroft as Lord Randolph’s beautiful American wife Jennie the opportunity to give bravura performances.



The supporting cast is a roll call of British acting talent, with Sir John Mills, Anthony Hopkins, Patrick Magee and Edward Woodward all enjoying themselves enormously. The most remarkable thing about the movie though is Simon Ward’s performance in the title role. He looks like Churchill, he sounds like Churchill, he captures the Churchillian gift for theatricality and most of all he captures Churchill’s sense of destiny. He is so good in this role that he did a great deal of harm to his career, so identified did he become with this one role. But he really is superb. His speech in the House of Commons at the end of the movie is spell-binding.

Director Richard Attenborough is quite comfortable handling the grand action sequences, and he certainly had a gift for getting performances from actors. Critics then and since have felt that he failed to penetrate beneath the surface of the grandiose Churchillian façade. Perhaps he did, but at least he resisted the temptation to try to tear down a hero merely because he was a hero.



Whatever shortcomings this film has it has to be said that it is enormously entertaining and visually magnificent. And it’s certainly worth seeing just for Simon Ward’s uncanny performance. Recommended.

The Region 2 DVD looks terrific and includes interviews with Simon Ward and Richard Attenborough as extras.