“I needed to keep pushing my limits, to keep going further. Brody’s Houdini intoning thoughts about death and his own motivations. Brody show us these things, it has him tell them to us, repeatedly. The screenplay presents a Houdini who has a strong emotional attachment to his mother and an obsession with escaping the ordinary, but instead of having Mr. Edel and the script don’t respect that, or the audience. Brody, who won the best-actor Oscar for the 2002 film “The Pianist” and has done television only rarely, is capable of all sorts of subtlety and nuance, but Mr.
A stage musical is in the works, though Hugh Jackman, who was to play Houdini, recently dropped out. Houdini’s story has been told in film (Tony Curtis portrayed him in 1953) and onstage, including an intriguing production by the Axis Theater Company in New York last winter. Debunking their parlor-trick acts became a sort of second career for him, one that put him at odds with, among others, Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Once he became famous, he took to attacking spiritualists, who were thriving in the early part of the last century with claims that they could communicate with the dead. Houdini (1874-1926) became an international star with his daring escapes and illusions, rising from sideshow-style schlock to performances in theaters and opera houses by combining showmanship and a knack for publicity. The script, though, is less than he deserved.
A fine, Oscar-winning actor, Adrien Brody, was recruited for the title role, and he’s a treat to watch. The History channel is the latest to try telling his story, with “Houdini,” a two-parter being broadcast Monday and Tuesday nights. Harry Houdini spent his later years debunking mystics and their séances, but he inadvertently proved that there is life after death in at least one sense: Make your time on earth grand and eventful, as he did, and people will be fascinated by you long after you’re gone.
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