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.

Janet leigh houdini