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Several magical effects are played out in their entirety and primarily in long shot. HOUDINI is mounted as a lavish magic show within a movie. (uncredited) performing the Guillotine act at the SAM convention in the film. And speaking of The Magic Castle, that's co-founder Bill Larsen, Jr. "Dunninger was a blow hard," Curtis would tell a Magic Castle audience in 2009. Dunninger receives a lavish credit as technical advisor, but according to Tony Curtis, the true technical advisor on the film was George Boston. Other cast included Angela Clarke as "Mama", and Torin Thatcher as Harry's fictional assistant and manager Otto. Pal and director George Marshall cast real-life husband and wife Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh in the roles of Harry and Bess Houdini. This time the result was the big, bold Technicolor treat we know today as HOUDINI. Then in September 1951, Paramount reacquired the rights to the Kellock book from Cohen and Raboff when producer George Pal expressed interest in the project. In May 1949, a former drug store operator, Joseph Raboff, and a real estate man, Earl Cohen, acquired the rights to the Kellock book in the hopes of making a movie and a television series with either John Garfield or Lee Cobb in the lead role. Under the supervision of Dore Schary, several scripts were developed, but no movie ever resulted. In 1936, Beatrice Houdini and her manager Edward Saint sold film rights to the book Houdini His Life Story by Harold Kellock to Paramount. RKO developed, but never produced, a movie that would be a thinly veiled fictional biopic called Now You See It. Since the 1930s, Hollywood had worked to tell the life of the great magician.

While HOUDINI is almost entirely a work of fiction, it does capture the glamor, drama, and danger of Harry Houdini in a way that I think would have made the Master Mystifier proud. It's amazing just how many magic and Houdini buffs, including myself, cite this one film as the reason they became interested in the subject. Unquestionably the most famous Houdini biopic is Paramount's 1953 HOUDINI starring Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh.