This looks interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh0F1glgKBk

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00...ownandoutint-20

What are some good books/and or movies dealing with Houdini? I've never seen the movie version by Milos Forman, but E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime is a good novel in which Houdini is one of the main characters. I haven't read it in a while, but there's actually an H.P. Lovecraft story in which Houdini is the protagonist; I should probably read it again sometime soon. (Something like that might make a pretty cool movie.)

There's 'The Arcanum', by Thomas Wheeler. The main protaganists are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, and Marie Laveau with Lovecraft and Crowley also involved. It was optioned for a movie, but who knows if that still on track.

There was the 1953 biopic, HOUDINI, starring Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. I remember liking it, although I don't know how accurate it is. There've been three TV movies about Houdini since then. You can look up Houdini as a character on IMDB and find the TV movies.

Also, there was the British film, FAIRY TALE: A TRUE STORY (1997) about two girls in England who took photos purportedly showing actual fairies. Peter O'Toole plays Arthur Conan Doyle, who believed the photos were real. Harvey Keitel plays Houdini, who insisted the photos were faked. History proved Houdini right (the girls eventually admitted as much), although the movie doesn't tell us that.

The Tony Curtis movie is fun but wildly inaccurate, with the eventual death devised for Houdini being a complete fabrication.

My favorite books that deal with Houdini: he makes an excellent appearance or two in Carter Beats the Devil. For works of non-fiction, Hiding the Elephant is my favorite, it being a history of illusionists and magic in general, with Houdini as the focal point.

And although he never actually appears in the book, he certainly influences the characters in The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

In addition to the books Keith mentions, which I also quite like and would also single out Hiding the Elephant as excellent, there are also a couple Houdini biographies that should be on everyone's reading list. First up is the classic Kenneth Silverman HOUDINI!!!, which remains the definitive on Houdini the man. But to get the best picture of his career, the surprising THE SECRET LIFE OF HOUDINI must go along side it; just recently published, it provides new details about Houdini's work for the Secret Service, believe it or not, and also provides speculation on the actual cause of his death that almost resulted in an exhumation of his body for testing last year, if it wasn't halted by one surviving descendant who absolutely didn't want to know, overriding descendants who did. Both books are excellent. The Silverman, alas, is currently out of print.

The boxed set from KINO looks like a must-have. I've only seen the Alpha Video release of THE MAN FROM BEYOND and it was quite enjoyable. Houdini has a heck of a screen presence, and the "escape" in the film is marvelous to behold. The story, of a man frozen in the arctic and thawed out many years later to fall in love with the reincarnation of his love from that time is also quite interesting, and clearly made when he and Arthur Conan Doyle were still on good terms with each other.