Word: houdini
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Watching Horowitz unsuccessfully trying to shatter glass with a high note recorded on Memorex tape is a little like watching Houdini expose a séance. Commercials are viewed as a kind of ghost hunting; the greater fun is for viewers to see how they are being fooled, to see the bamboozler bamboozled. Most of the products Horowitz tests pass with high marks-he estimates 75%-but the blood sport is watching the advertisers turn into bozos when Horowitz can't wipe the scrawl off the Sherwin-Williams paint job, when three dozen eggs (out of 14 dozen...
...David Mamet has trundled out the theme of a reversal between two artistes, the aged veteran and the anxious ingenue, and bandied "concepts" about the stage for the better part of an hour before switching the characters' roles in a sleight of hand so fast it would have dazzled Houdini. The reversal, developed with delicious deliberation in A life in the Theater, happening so awkwardly here, so long after we have lost all interest in the characters, serves only to leave an unpleasant taste of dissatisfaction and cheapness. Bill Young plays the established writer Arthur with a mince and grating...
...Harry Houdini...
...from a newsreel of the American soul circa 1910. Archetypes are intercut with tintypes; a panorama of mass or class dissolves into a closeup of an agitated bourgeois mind; fable is superimposed on history. And they all run like hell to the D.W. Griffith finish line. Long shot: Harry Houdini performs thrilling escapes, restaging his own birth trauma for a country just then emerging from isolationism into imperialism. Closeup: Emma Goldman, anarchist spellbinder, woos Evelyn Nesbit out of her petticoats and prejudices. Two-shot: Henry Ford and John Pierpont Morgan discuss reincarnation in the Morgan Library. A few chapters later...
...nation. Acts like the Back Alley troupe pass through Cambridge on cross-country jaunts "just to be able to say we've played the Square--it's quite a big deal," says Van Alstyne. Magician Peter Sosna, who insists he's the only guy in town who can perform Houdini's identity-switching act on the street, points out that some people rank New York's Washington Square Park ahead of Cambridge. "No way. They don't know what they're talking about, and you can tell because they all want to come here," he explains with a wink...