Harry Houdini continues to fascinate…
There are daredevils who scale the Eiffel Tower, or leap across the Great Wall of China on a skateboard, or plunge over Niagara Falls in a barrel, but they don’t provoke endless interpretation years after their exploits; most movie stuntmen retire into knobby oblivion. Houdini’s strangeness and ambition—the nakedness, the liberationist triumphs—still fascinate us. A little guy who always escaped, he flourished in a century that saw mass incarceration, mass murder, the humiliation and destruction of entire populations.
