It details his beginnings as a carnival performer, later as a worker in a safe factory, and finally his international success as a world-renowned escape artist and stage magician.

In the 1890s, young Harry Houdini (Tony Curtis) is performing with a Coney Island carnival as Bruto, the Wild Man, when Bess (Janet Leigh), a naive onlooker, tries to protect him from the blows of Schultz (Sig Ruman), his "trainer".

Bess becomes Harry's onstage partner, touring the country with him, but soon grows tired of the low pay and grueling schedule.

Afterward, however, Fante advises Harry to "drop it", noting that Johann Von Schweger, a German magician, retired at the height of his career after performing a similar feat, fearful of his own talents.

Bess then persuades Harry to give her the prize, a single, round-trip boat ticket to Europe, so that she can cash it in for a down payment on a house.

Harry, who hired Dooley to issue the challenge, accepts, unaware that the cells do not have locks in the doors, but are mounted on the outside walls.

Now billed as the "man who escaped from Scotland Yard", Harry begins a successful tour of Europe with Bess.

During his trial, Harry denies that he ever made claims to supernatural powers, insisting that all his tricks are accomplished through physical means.

There, Harry finds he is virtually unknown, so for publicity, he hangs upside down on a skyscraper flagpole, constrained by a straitjacket.

During the trick, which takes place on Halloween, the chain holding the box breaks, and it drops upside down into an opening in the ice-covered river.

Although Harry manages to escape from the box, the current drags him downstream, and he struggles to find air pockets under the ice and swim back to the opening.

After a public crusade against phony mediums, Harry decides to return to the stage and builds a watery torture cell for the occasion.

[5] Dunninger was a good friend to many notables in the magic community including Houdini himself, Francis Martinka, and Tony Slydini.

[6] In July 1952, Paramount announced that Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh would star under the direction of George Marshall.

Houdini was exposing the falsity of these charlatans [spiritualists], and I think it was more difficult for audiences to accept that phase of the picture, especially at that time".