Entertainment defying cinema
What do Harry Houdini, Tony Curtis and myself have in common? We all have Hungarian mothers. What do Tony Curtis and myself have in common? We both refused to see Brokeback Mountain. And what do Harry Houdini and Tony Curtis have in common? They featured in the two best portrayals of Harry Houdini’s life.
     Houdini was universally lauded for playing the role of himself from 1874 until 1926. Tony Curtis (aka Bernie Schwartz) played the same role, just once, in 1953.
     So where does Guy Pearce fit in? He doesn’t; but it’s not his fault. My opinion is somewhat skewed, because I like Guy, so I think of him as the best actor in a bad Houdini movie called Death Defying Acts. Houdini, the world’s greatest escape artist, did indeed many times defy death. But I defy anyone to nominate one performance of note in the career of, Pearce’s co-star, Catherine Zeta-Jones?
     The high point of her career surely must be 1999’s Entrapment, where her entire performance was, quite frankly, carried by Sean Connery. The following year she managed to entrap Michael Douglas—she marries far better than she acts.
     Guy Pearce hasn’t exactly set the world on fire with his career; but he played a pretty good role, in a very good film, with an exceptionally good cast: LA Confidential. Pearce played good cop to Russell Crowe's bad cop in LA Confidential and both acquitted themsleves so ably, at the time, I predicated a stellar career as a major Hollywood star for one of them; and I thought Russell Crowe might do alright as well. So I was somewhat off in that predication; but, so far in their careers, Pearce beats Zeta-Jones hands down.
     Death Defying Acts goes wrong by attempting to portray a fictional series of events in the life of a very real character. Al Gore got away with a similar treatment in An Inconvenient Truth but this should not be a green light for other filmmakers.
     This Houdini film really begins and ends nowhere… or Scotland to be more precise. The plot is centred around his well documented real life ambitions to debunk psychic mediums; but any sane person knows that psychics are cranks, so what’s the point?
     While the treatment of this particular Houdini story might be somewhat original, albeit on the outer margins of originality, the broader treatment of the film is anything but. Death Defying Acts piggy backs, rather awkwardly, off two similar magician/illusionist period pieces to come out in the same twelve month period. First came The Prestige with Hugh Jackman (an even more likeable Australian actor than Guy Pearce); Michael Caine (a far more likeable, and talented, Brit than Zeta-Jones); and Scarlett Johansson (who am I to argue with Wood Allen?). The second, The Illusionist with Ed Norton—a fine actor.
     Death Defying Acts follows the other two with same ‘attention to detail’ coupled with ‘drab color’ in costume and production design. Cinematography, in all three, is the big aperture, low light stuff that screams,‘this is more than one hunderd years ago!’ Apparently, prior to 1925 the sun rarely, if ever, came out. Ranking the three pictures is not easy; but handing the bronze medal to Death Defying Acts is a good place to start.                           
     It would have been far better to go down the ‘biopic’ road (all the rage these days) and tell Houdini’s life story. Then again, what would the point be here? As pointed out earlier, Tony Curtis got it right first time round in 1953. Unlike Guy Pearce, Curtis did it with the aid of a better script, better direction and a much better co-star in Janet Leigh (who was incidentally the first of six Mrs Tony Curtis’s). Tony and Janet also managed to produce Jamie Leigh-Curtis; a greater achievement than that of the producers of Death Defying Acts.
     A great film? Hardly. An opportunity to pay homage to a great Hungarian? Absolutely. I did so by making my ‘escape’ long before the final credits rolled.