The Man from Beyond

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.

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!

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.

Written by the master escape technician, Harry Houdini, THE MAN FROM BEYOND is a fantasy of one who lived before, and is also produced and stars Houdini, who portrays Howard Hillary, an Arctic explorer who is revived after being encased within ice for 100 years aboard a ghost ship, and who then must deal with a vastly changed world. This is the first effort released by Houdini Picture Corporation, and is filmed in large part at and about Lake Placid in New York, and Niagara Falls to the brink of which the stalwart Hillary is whirled in his efforts to save his lady love, Felice (Jane Connelly), from apparently certain death by drowning and, previously, from designs of immoral blackguards. The plot is quite melodramatic, as Felice, in Hillary's eyes, was his fiancee aboard the Arctic vessel wherein he was trapped by a storm following a losing battle with the ship's captain, and he must, in 1922, convince her that she was his beloved in an earlier manifestation a century of years before, and thereby wrest her from her current beau, who has designs upon her fortune, and the latter's partner in crime, Marie La Grande (Nita Naldi in a brief appearance). Houdini, who utilized the sobriquet Man From Beyond, was enthralled by the possibility of linkage between the material world and a spiritual domain (although he detested spiritualists), and his script conveys his philosophy rather didactically as based upon his extensive study of the arcane.

A man (Harry Houdini) who has been frozen in the Arctic ice for 100 years returns to civilization to find his lost love.

I was drawn to this film because it was written by and stars Harry Houdini, the master magician. Appleton, Wisconsin has claimed Houdini as their own, and it is within this community that I have lived for over thirty years. So it seemed like I owed it to myself to watch the film.

Unlike many silent films, it has lots of written words. I would not even call them intertitles, because so much of it is long sections of spiritual quotation or philosophy. It is quite unlike what I have seen in other silent films.

The plot is general is odd, as on the surface it seems to be a man who is unfrozen after 100 years only to find someone who reminds him of the woman he loved. But there is a deeper story of reincarnation, and the role of science and religion in the modern world. In many ways, this film is not only outstanding for its creativity and originality, but is also far enough outside the box to be otherworldly...