Written by the master escape technician, Harry Houdini, THE MAN FROM BEYOND is a fantasy of one who lived before, and is also produced and stars Houdini, who portrays Howard Hillary, an Arctic explorer who is revived after being encased within ice for 100 years aboard a ghost ship, and who then must deal with a vastly changed world. This is the first effort released by Houdini Picture Corporation, and is filmed in large part at and about Lake Placid in New York, and Niagara Falls to the brink of which the stalwart Hillary is whirled in his efforts to save his lady love, Felice (Jane Connelly), from apparently certain death by drowning and, previously, from designs of immoral blackguards. The plot is quite melodramatic, as Felice, in Hillary's eyes, was his fiancee aboard the Arctic vessel wherein he was trapped by a storm following a losing battle with the ship's captain, and he must, in 1922, convince her that she was his beloved in an earlier manifestation a century of years before, and thereby wrest her from her current beau, who has designs upon her fortune, and the latter's partner in crime, Marie La Grande (Nita Naldi in a brief appearance). Houdini, who utilized the sobriquet Man From Beyond, was enthralled by the possibility of linkage between the material world and a spiritual domain (although he detested spiritualists), and his script conveys his philosophy rather didactically as based upon his extensive study of the arcane.
