Harry Houdini in The Master Mystery (1919-20, dir. Harry Grossman & Burton L. King)

While at the height of his fame as a magician & escape artist in the late 1910s, Harry Houdini attempted to make the jump to screen stardom. His first major vehicle was The Master Mystery, a 15-chapter serial that served as a showcase for Houdini’s greatest escapes. 

Each episode ends with a cliffhanger: Houdini restrained & in peril - nailed inside a packing crate dumped in a river, tied up over a vat of acid, strapped to an electric chair, tied up underneath a descending elevator, or, as in the episode pictured above, wrapped in barbed wire and dumped in the path of an acid stream. Just as our hero is about to buy the farm, a “to be continued” title card cuts off the action, a technique that had record-breaking crowds returning to the theater every week to see the escape (supposedly accomplished with no camera tricks) that began each ensuing chapter.

Harry Houdini escapes a straitjacket while hanging from a crane in New York City, a feat he accomplished by dislocating his shoulders (1907) (via) Video footage of one of his hanging straitjacket escapes here.

Important advice from Harry Houdini:

“No performer should attempt to bite off red-hot iron unless he has a good set of teeth.”

“Flames from the lips may be produced by holding in the mouth a sponge saturated with the purest gasoline.”

“To cause the face to appear in a mass of flame make use of the following: mix together thoroughly petroleum, lard, mutton tallow and quick lime. Distill this over a charcoal fire, and the liquid which results can be burned on the face without harm.”

Lou Reed & Nico in Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1966)

Orson Welles performs the “Broomstick Suspension” magic trick with Lucille Ball (1956, photo taken during the filming of the I Love Lucy episode, “Lucy Meets Orson Welles”) (scene online here)

“I’ve never had a friend in my life who wanted to see a magic trick, you know. I don’t know anybody who wants to see a magic trick. So I do it professionally; it’s the only way I get to perform.

I went once to a birthday party for [MGM boss] Louis B. Mayer with a rabbit in my pocket which I was going to take out of his hat. On came Judy Garland and Danny Kaye and Danny Thomas and everybody you ever heard of and then Al Jolson sang for two hours and my rabbit was peeing all over me, you know. And the dawn was starting to rise over the Hillcrest Country Club as we said goodnight to Louis B. Mayer and nobody’d asked me to do a magic trick. So the rabbit and I went home.”

-Orson Welles, in 1982 documentary The Orson Welles Story

On not taking your own advice:

“To succeed in life means to count only on oneself, to remove oneself forever from dependency, to learn solitude, to no longer endure the disappointments inflicted by others, to no longer disperse one’s energies, to only give the gift of one’s presence after reflection, to know how to keep quiet, and to listen to what really matters, [and] to look in depth at what really is deserving.”

-Brigitte Bardot, in her memoir Initiales B.B. (photo by Sam Levin, 1967)

“My great problem is that I’ve always felt -and especially since I’ve become a so-called personality, a celebrity, & so forth -that it was all a very exposable myth that I was somebody. I’ve felt that this was an absurd dishonesty and that if I were close to people, it would be instantly evident & they would say, ‘Well, gee, he’s nothing at all. What do we want to see him for?’ If I can talk to someone for just five minutes, five vital minutes, I feel I can carry on the myth of being a full person, but any longer and I would be shown up as an empty, worthless nothing… all colorless and shrinking, invisible.

Ironically, I spent a couple of years playing parts in which I was supposed to be a decisive person, but all the while I was in a torment over this feeling of being a total cipher. It just about paralyzed me.”

-Anthony Perkins, in 1960 Sat. Evening Post interview (quoted in Charles Winecoff’s Split Image) (photo by Sam Levin, 1963)

Anthony Perkins in The Trial (1962, dir. Orson Welles) (photo by Roger Corbeau)

“Let me remind you of the old legal maxim: a suspect is better off moving than at rest, for one at rest may be on the scales without knowing it, being weighed with all his sins.”

Greta Garbo in Flesh and the Devil (1927, dir. Clarence Brown)

The elusive, post-retirement Greta Garbo walking in New York (1955, photo by Lisa Larsen for LIFE)

“I have no plans, not for the movies, not for the stage, not for anything. I’m sort of drifting…Sometimes I put on my coat at 10 in the morning and go out and follow people. I just go where they’re going. I mill around.”

-Garbo, on her life after leaving Hollywood (LIFE magazine, Jan. 24th, 1955)

via A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969, dir. Bill Melendez)

”You can’t create humor out of happiness. I’m astonished at the number of people who write to me saying, ‘Why can’t you create happy stories for us? Why does Charlie Brown always have to lose? Why can’t you let him kick the football?’ Well, there is nothing funny about the person who gets to kick the football.”

-Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Me