HHCE Collection

The following is from an article in my personal collection:

The first stunt Houdini performs is the opening of a barred door by manipulating a piece of wire and a bunch of keys so that he can draw back the bolt and so gain entrance. Then, whilst taking forty winks at this desk, his fellow reporters play a joke upon him and place handcuffs upon his wrists. They are amazed at the ease at which he removes them. Next he causes an automatic pistol to appear miraculously in his hand, which is held high in the air. He also opens a locked gate by manipulating the lock. When the hero is arrested for murder, he puts up a strenuous fight, but is finally overpowered by nearly a dozen men. Then he is chained, handcuffed, and locked so that it seems impossible that a man could get away. But he performs the feat right in front of the camera. Removing the chains he attaches them to a prison bed, and, using leverage, forces the bars over the window. Then he climbs to the ledge, and clinging to the wall makes his way straight up to the roof. He goes out to the end of a horizontal flagpole to secure the rope and climbs downward to earth.

Here comes one of the most interesting actions of the picture, although one of the quickest. Crouching in an alleyway, Houdini hurls himself between the front and rear wheels of a moving motor car, and with what seems like a continuous movement grasps the underhanging portion of the chassis and so escapes. He climbs up a drain pipe to the roof of a house, and by a clever move and by a clever move sends his pursuers on a false scent. But he is captured and is taken to an asylum, where he is placed in a strait-jacket, removes the ropes and falls to an awning many feet below. One of the most difficult of the stunts, however, is when Houdini, pinioned hand and foot to four separate bended trees, which keep him swinging in mid-air, effects an escape.

The greatest scene of all, and one in which was entirely unpremeditated, is when Houdini crawls out of the fuselage of an aeroplane and lands upon the top plant of another. But the machines, running too close together, suddenly strike, and the plane containing Houdini, the heroin and Allison makes a mad spiral dive to the ground and strikes the earth with tremendous force. The machine is broken up, but fortunately no one is injured. It had been intended to land in the ordinary manner.

[February 21, 1920 The Film Renter & Moving Picture News]