When Vaudeville started to stagger with the
advent of the motion picture, Houdini, now a very wealthy man,
decided to make a career in the movies. His first motion
pictures were well publicized and well received. Houdini would
visit as many as fifteen theaters each day promoting his
pictures. In the movies Houdini would of course do impossible
feats of escape and daring. Most of which were being performed
by stunt men, but the public was never to know that it was not
Harry himself. The first of these full length movies, "The
Grim Game," was a huge success. But, soon word got out that
photography could be "tricked" and Houdini found that
he was not as well received in the cinema as he was in person.
This gave way to his next innovation.
In 1922 Houdini embarked on a campaign to rid
the country of fraudulent spirit mediums. These mediums were
capitalizing on families who were mourning over the deaths of
their boys in the war. Houdini made a $10,000 challenge to any
medium who could produce a manifestation which he could not
duplicate or explain. Houdini wrote a book to accompany his
campaign, entitled Houdini Magician Among the Spirits.
In that grander than life Houdini style,
Houdini testified to Congress or a sub committee investigating
the fraudulent mediums. For the last few years of his life,
Houdini traveled the country with a full evening show which was
part escapes, part magic and mostly fraudulent medium expose.
His death, the result of gangrenous
appendicitis; not while inside his famous water torture cell as
his legend has many believing, is said to have occurred on
Halloween, in 1927. He was performing at the Princess Theater in
Montreal after breaking his ankle in his previous performance in
Albany.
