Granted, that only the grandest of silent films ever rises from the flailing ruins of those stuttering sentimental gestures, so mechanically struck by it's insubstantial shadow-marionnettes, faithful to the chattering death of the stilted society which rattled their bones like beads, only to shatter in the moonlight that drains any human warmth, just as night without a candle stiffly draws the blizzard of mothy ashes into the lime-light, light falling, frozen, dusty, over scenes that vision forgets - - - yet, at their best, these ghosts can demonstrate how to die with style.
Alas! not here the preposterous glories of a Phantom of the Opera.
Here, au contraire, a fitfully animated corpse rapidly freezes our living interest. The Man from Beyond, even as Houdini's alter ego, never succeeds in escaping his writer's block of ice. A notion not necessarily more preposterous than the gibbering of many a later entertainment, that has dabbled in the matter of Death, is quickly doomed by the unseeing eye of the director, and the shambling course of the plot.
The only escapade in which Houdini at last, though briefly, sloughs off his bonds of frozen celluloid is during the Niagra rescue sequence, when rapid cutting almost renders the drama fluid. But the trickle of inspiration issuing from the love-lorn block of ice, through the cold shower and restraint put on passion (in the cell where a heart was supposed to beat), gathering to an irresistible torrent of overwhelming passion above the Falls, just never gathers force. Perhaps Houdini's Freudian slipperiness was just too much for director Julian's imagination to hold on to?
Despite Julian's habitual Big White Hunter impersonation on set, with jackboots, johdpurs, and solar topee, this film is definitively the One That Got Away. Julian was himself the original and quintessential parody of the silent, Stroheim-fixated, movie director, and this film is the essential guide to everything we feared was true about Film before the sanity of sound came, and filled up the booming emptiness of those trackless wastes, where stranded, phosphorescent phantoms open and shut their useless mouths under the empty glare of the sand-filled lens of other days.
Let us restore these ashes to that Vault, from which no light escapes. This thing is a parody of light - a jerking, staggering, Dance of Death. Lock it away - the Horror!
