The Man from Beyond

Harry Houdini is found frozen in a black of ice and thawed out after 100 years. He finds what he thinks is the reincarnation of his lover and has to help her over come some bad guys.

Well made melodramatic thriller chugs along at a good clip until you suddenly realize that other than some great stunts Houdini isn't going to do anything "magical". Its not bad, actually far from it, its just that this is Houdini and you want something wondrous. Worse the one magical bit, the cell escape is cut up in such away as to make it dull and unbelievable. I'm guessing it wasn't filmed that way, but breaking it into the start of the event and then having it finish as a flash back kills it. From what I've read this is the problem with most of Houdini's films and was the reason it never really went anywhere. Worth a look for magic nuts who'll want to see Houdini in action, and for anyone else who wants to see an okay little melodrama.

Early in his career on the stage escape artist and magician Harry Houdini made a living partly showing how the popular faze of spiritualists were hoodwinking the public. He did this by demonstrating to his audiences some of the tricks they used to supposedly communicate with the dead. Houdini still believed there was a spiritual world in the afterlife, but he saw the dishonesty of those who exhibited such interactions with the dead during their seances. When he met Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, novelist of super sleuth Sherlock Holmes, the two established a friendship despite the writer possessng a firm belief in spiritualism, reinforced by the death of his son during World War One who he felt was always near him .

Houdini had acted in a series of films before he established his own movie production company to get more control over his pictures. Partly inspired by Doyle's firm belief in the spiritual world, the magician embarked on a project that dealt with reincarnation and the afterlife. In April 1922's "The Man From Beyond," he plays a man frozen on an old sunken Arctic ship who's thawed out, only to eventually meet his fiancee of 100 years before. She, meanwhile, is caught up in a riveting scheme by modern day shysters.

Doyle was impressed by the Houdini movie. The author believed the magician had super human powers in interacting with the next dimension by his staged acts. The writer's second wife, Jean Leckie, was a self-prescribed spiritualist who claimed she could communicate with Houdini's late wife. Harry agreed to attend her session. When Jean produced a handwritten passage of her transcription of what Houdini's mother claimed to say during the seance, he scoffed at the session. His mother, he claimed, did not know hardly any English, yet Jean's submitted page had her speaking flawless English.

Houdini and Doyle argued the point in public, causing a rift in their friendship. The magician did agree with his wife Bess that if he died he would attempt to communicate with her in secret code. When he passed away from an untimely death in 1926, she conducted a seance every year around Halloween for 10 years, when she gave up the annual tradition. "10 years is long enough to wait for any man," she lamented.

"The Man From Beyond" was Houdini's fourth movie, which didn't produce the box office results he had hoped for. He acted and produced in one more film, 'Haldane of the Secret Service,' in 1923, before he gave up movies and returned to the stage. As one biographer commented, "His 'acting' consists of three expressions: pucker-lipped flirtatiousness, open-eyed surprise, and brow-knitted distress."

Granted, that only the grandest of silent films ever rises from the flailing ruins of those stuttering sentimental gestures, so mechanically struck by it's insubstantial shadow-marionnettes, faithful to the chattering death of the stilted society which rattled their bones like beads, only to shatter in the moonlight that drains any human warmth, just as night without a candle stiffly draws the blizzard of mothy ashes into the lime-light, light falling, frozen, dusty, over scenes that vision forgets - - - yet, at their best, these ghosts can demonstrate how to die with style.

Alas! not here the preposterous glories of a Phantom of the Opera.

Here, au contraire, a fitfully animated corpse rapidly freezes our living interest. The Man from Beyond, even as Houdini's alter ego, never succeeds in escaping his writer's block of ice. A notion not necessarily more preposterous than the gibbering of many a later entertainment, that has dabbled in the matter of Death, is quickly doomed by the unseeing eye of the director, and the shambling course of the plot.

The only escapade in which Houdini at last, though briefly, sloughs off his bonds of frozen celluloid is during the Niagra rescue sequence, when rapid cutting almost renders the drama fluid. But the trickle of inspiration issuing from the love-lorn block of ice, through the cold shower and restraint put on passion (in the cell where a heart was supposed to beat), gathering to an irresistible torrent of overwhelming passion above the Falls, just never gathers force. Perhaps Houdini's Freudian slipperiness was just too much for director Julian's imagination to hold on to?

Despite Julian's habitual Big White Hunter impersonation on set, with jackboots, johdpurs, and solar topee, this film is definitively the One That Got Away. Julian was himself the original and quintessential parody of the silent, Stroheim-fixated, movie director, and this film is the essential guide to everything we feared was true about Film before the sanity of sound came, and filled up the booming emptiness of those trackless wastes, where stranded, phosphorescent phantoms open and shut their useless mouths under the empty glare of the sand-filled lens of other days.

Let us restore these ashes to that Vault, from which no light escapes. This thing is a parody of light - a jerking, staggering, Dance of Death. Lock it away - the Horror!

Man From Beyond, The (1922)

** (out of 4)

Early science fiction mixed with drama has a man (Harry Houdini) frozen in the Arctic for 100 years. When he's discovered, a scientist thraws him out and when he awakens he wants the love of his life back. This is a pretty boring film even with its short running time of 61-minutes. There's really not too much going on as a murder sideplot is pretty boring. An exciting ending and seeing Houdini do some of his famous stunts are the only reasons to watch this.

Now available through Kino with other Houdini shorts. This version is a lot better than the public domain release by Alpha.

The Man from Beyond (1922)

Houdini has such legend around him, I went ahead with this fairly creaky silent film anyway. And it has some great aspects if you can go with the style.

The premise is simple—two men stuck in the arctic ice go looking for shelter and by a miracle stumble on an abandoned ship stuck in the ice for a century. And they find a man frozen in ice for the same 100 years—and wake him! Yes, and they by some snap of the fingers find their way back to New York, where the two men want to present their revived fellow to the world.

All of this is great fantasy stuff, almost like time-travel, with some action adventure tossed in. One of the two original lost men is a crazed scientist, the other a "half breed," and so things have to percolate of course. And the frozen man, now quite normal if a bit confused to be in 1920 instead of 1820, has to grapple with all the problems of being out of place. The theme that is forced on the film is reincarnation, and it's a bit stiff for modern tastes.

The filming is fairly straight forward, even compared to some better films from earlier (like, yes, "Birth of a Nation" which is 1915). The plot is often told with intertitles instead of action, out of necessity, but it slows it down. (One of the arts of silent films is how they learn to make clear the plot visually.)

Houdini plays the frozen man (no surprise there) and he falls in love with the wrong woman and generally makes a mess of things. Yet, love being what it is, things are not all bleak. It's a curious contrivance of events. And there are even flashbacks (some going back 100 years to when the man was last conscious). There are also different tints to different sections of the film, which is common for the time and effective.

Of course, the bottom line is whether to see this movie, and why. First of all, if you haven't seen silent films before, start with something great so you'll see what they are capable of. The terrific comics (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd) are dependable. If you stretch back to 1922, there are more elegantly made movies from this time, for sure—check out D.W. Griffith.

But if you are Houdini fan, or you already know what silent movies are all about, this is a decent but not spectacular film. It feels too stiff too often, is wordy, and lacks a consistent trajectory for the plot. The storytelling is fairly complex, so you have to keep on your toes—which is good. It won't bore you for that reason.

You might get tired of the middle half, where the sparring for the woman in question is sometimes dull stuff. The Houdini part? Well, you'll see. There is one major "escape" shown, and there is a wonderful final long scene at Niagara falls, without intertitles, dramatic and fast paced.