While in New York City, I took in a few films I would have otherwise missed (the intoxicating My Winnipeg, featuring 1940s B-movie actress Ann Savage) or given a miss (the eerie Happening, which went nowhere, but worked well as a prolonged exercise in foreshadowing). Of these offerings, The Incredible Hulk was certainly the least, despite the compelling opening sequences shot on location in Brazil. Thereafter, Fantastic Four and X-Men: The Last Stand screenwriter’s Zack Penn’s adaptation of the Marvel strip exhausted itself, like so many of today’s nominal blockbusters, in CGI trickery that, after all these years, still fails to convince me.
Lou Ferrigno’s cameo sure made me long for the days in which monsters were made of materials that a more or less effectively resembled flesh and bone and stuntmen were at hand to bruise and break theirs for our amusement—the kind of hands-on work recalled for us in the unlikely medium of radio as a series of dramatic reenactments titled Daredevils of Hollywood.
I appreciate a solid stunt or expertly executed legerdemain, which is why I admire the work of the digits-deficient Harold Lloyd and the spectacles of the silent era in general.
During a visit to Niagara Falls, I wondered whether Harry Houdini, who also starred in a series of silent films, had ever gone over them in a barrel. He did not; but that is just the kind of stunt his public would have expected of the great escape artist, whose specter looms large in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which I had devoured not long before my trip to Niagara.
Rich in pop cultural references to comic books and superheroes, the novel makes mention of Houdini, a “hero to little men, city boys, and Jews,” in the opening paragraph:
In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. “To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing,” he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal. “You weren’t the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini’s first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started. It was called ‘Metamorphosis.’ It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation.” The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London. Yet his account of his role—of the role of his own imagination—in the Escapist’s birth, like all of his best fabulations, rang true. His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.
There was no escaping the illusionist and stunt performer. So, while browsing at one of New York City’s few remaining video stores, I was not surprised to come across Harry Houdini box set, which I promptly snatched up.
Earlier this week, I screened The Man from Beyond (1922). A convoluted and somewhat ramshackle thriller involving cryonics, the supernatural, and plenty of melodramatic villainy, Beyond features a Niagara Falls-set climax not unlike the one in Henry Hathaway’s previously mentioned technicolor spectacle Niagara (1953). The only trickery is achieved through editing, which, to be sure, makes film a dubious vehicle for the display of an illusionist’s real-time feats. That aside, however, and despite all its cardboard hooey, Beyond achieves a physicality—a corpo-reality—missing from today’s CGIdeated action-adventures. When it comes to movie magic, I take bodies over pixels any day.
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Harry Heuser 
On the other hand, with CGI it isn\’t too late for Houdini to brave the falls.
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I think he\’d turn over (in) his grave, Doug, if he hasn\’t escaped it already. A hands-on artist like Houdini wouldn\’t be caught half-alive in what goes for state-of-the-art special effects movies today.
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