Today I continue my series of posts, where I share different Master Mystery Exhibitors’ Ads from my personal collection:
- Houdini Talks About Himself and the Master Mystery
- Ruth Stonehouse Writes Plays When Only Six
- Houdini’s Tame Eagle in “The Master Mystery”
- The Triumph of Science. A Mechanical Man with a Superhuman Brain
- By Request of Hoover Houdini Chaffs Miss Marsh
- Kidnapped into Pictures
- Handcuffs I Have Met
- Houdini Breaks Own Record in “The Master Mystery”
- Why “The Master Mystery” is a Sure Record=Breaking Serial
- $25 for Houdini’s Secret
- Houdini Made the Kaiser Apologise. The Great Mystic a Victim of Hun Arrogance
- About Publicity
As Silverman pointed out in his HH biography, on film you can’t tell if the escape is real or fake. After securing him in the packing case, they could have stopped filming and let him out. Then cut to a shot of the packing case going into the river.
Page 233:
Rolfe used no better judgment in addressing the problem of how to photograph Houdini s “self-liberation stunts.” The technology of motion pictures could make anyone seem to perform the same escapes. He said he would therefore shoot Houdini in “uninterrupted close-up,” without a break and with no editing cuts. Useless, actually: filmed stage magic being indistinguishable from camera magic, the movie camera robbed magicians of their power to mystify. (As Houdini commented several years later, “No illusion is good in a film, as we simply resort to camera trix, and the deed is did.”)
…
“I think the film profession is the greatest,” he said in one of many press interviews, “and that the moving picture is the most wonderful thing in the world.” Movies allowed him, he explained, to preserve his feats for posterity before he lost the strength to do them, and show them to people around the world.