1/26/2024 0 Comments Harry houdini magic tricks videosSometimes knowingly, sometimes not, Houdini evoked actual cruelties-slavery and imprisonment, people cast into filthy cells and tormented for years. In a later version of the milk-can act, called “The Chinese Water Torture Cell,” he was lowered, head first, into a large glass-fronted box filled with water. Yet these simple escapes weren’t enough he needed to outdo himself and astound his audience. He would then have himself locked in a cell, encumbered with shackles, and would emerge a short time later, holding them in his hand. He would appear at some grim local jail or state prison, take off his clothes, and, to establish that he wasn’t hiding something on his person, undergo an intrusive inspection by a local medical examiner or police surgeon. He was short but handsome, beautiful, even, with a wide brow, glittering dark eyes, and muscular arms, shoulders, and thighs. Starting in San Francisco, in 1899, he often stripped naked in his handcuff routines. Therefore, I said to myself, why not give the public a real thrill?” He depended on tricks, but the possibility of an accident or a miscalculation or a clumsy assistant was tangible enough.Įven before the milk-can stunt, Houdini had gone further than other magicians. If we knew that there was no possibility of either one of them falling or, if they did fall, that they wouldn’t injure themselves in any way, we wouldn’t pay any more attention to them than we do a nursemaid wheeling a baby carriage. That risk, he later wrote, is what “attracts us to the man who paints the flagstaff on the tall building, or to the ‘human fly,’ who scales the walls of the same building. Magic challenges our sense of what’s real Houdini wanted to challenge the ultimate reality of death, by risking it over and over. What if he didn’t? “Failure means a drowning death,” as posters advertising the event warned. He was holding his breath as he tried to get out. The curtain was drawn, and, after a minute or two, the crowd would become fretful. The top of the can was padlocked, with Houdini submerged in the water-in later versions, done as promotional stunts, it was milk or beer. Members of the local police-with helmets reaching down around their ears and impressively ugly mustaches-stand to the side, looking like nothing so much as the baffled cops who harassed Charlie Chaplin a few years later. There is a photograph of the act in which Houdini’s unsmiling face sticks out above the can (his knees were pulled up to his chest). They filled it with water, the excess slopping over the sides as Houdini climbed in. Louis, Houdini and his assistants dragged onto the stage a sixty-gallon milk can, a larger version of the ones delivered to grocery stores. With a pack of cards in his hands, Houdini couldn’t kiss the hem of the late Ricky Jay’s rolled-up sleeve. As a mentalist, he would have been shamed by today’s master, Derren Brown. Never a great illusionist, he lacked mystery and atmosphere his stagecraft was ordinary. But now, having spent most of the previous five years in Europe, he had to conquer America all over again. He had conquered inspectors from Berlin and Scotland Yard, who chained him up and then watched, bewildered, as he broke free. Indeed, he was an affront to authorities everywhere. It was a time of intense anti-Semitism in Russia, and Houdini, who was Jewish, wanted to flummox the tsarist politsiya. In Europe, he had pulled off such stunts as escaping (in 1903) from the “Siberian Transport Cell,” a metal safe on wheels that was used to haul political renegades off to prison. As a beginner, he had performed with trained monkeys and fat ladies a few years later, he did his tricks in a tuxedo with a boutonnière. He had toured all over the United States, playing circus sideshows, vaudeville houses, and packed theatres of the Orpheum Circuit. He was thirty-four and had worked in show business for fifteen years. In 1908, Harry Houdini-“The World’s Handcuff King and Prison Breaker”-needed a new act.
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