Reviews – Page 2

Houdini and Doyle, Episode 2: A Dish of Adharma (reviewed)

A pattern is emerging; just as episode 1 of Houdini and Doyle drew together a circa 1900 social issue (the treatment of inmates in a Magdalene laundry) and a seemingly supernatural mystery (a ghostly murderer), A Dish of Adharma weaves the radical women’s suffrage movement together with a case of attempted assassination via (apparent) reincarnation.

During the dramatic opening sequence, a young boy holding a bouquet of flowers approaches Lydia Bellworth, a suffragette who has chained herself to a set of railings as a political protest. Lowering the bouquet to reveal a pistol, he then shoots her in the arm, saying “You murdered me!”

Houdini, Doyle and Stratton are quickly on the case. It transpires that the boy – a runaway adoptee – has been plagued by dreams and visions of a life that he has not lived and believes himself to be the reincarnation of a bohemian artist named Martin Upton, who died some twelve years earlier. Upton is revealed to have been the secret lover of Lydia Bellworth.

The investigators discover that the boy – whose real name is Peter – has actually become fixated upon the life and death of Martin Upton via obsessively studying Upton’s secret journal, to the point that Peter’s own identity has become submerged. Eventually the truth comes out – Lydia Bellworth really did kill Marton Upton, because he refused responsibility when she became pregnant with his child, who was then adopted out immediately after birth. In a truly Dickensian turn of events, that child turns out to be none other than young Peter.

The boy is reunited with his loving adoptive parents and (one hopes) recovers his own identity, independent of that of his murdered father.

A Dish of Adharma offers us a suitably twisty gothic mystery and some further insights into the lives and psyches of our protagonists. Doyle struggles to be a good father to his young daughter Mary, who is beginning to question her own role and future in a society that systematically devalues girls and women. Meanwhile, Houdini’s fascination with the still-enigmatic Adelaide Stratton leads them into a “truth-trade” game that may betoken a deeper future relationship between them.

Random observations:

Although the mystery is again revealed to have a strictly non-supernatural (if only just plausible) solution, the question remains as to how Peter was able to lead Houdini, Doyle and Stratton to the exact site of his father’s secret, unmarked grave. Obviously, that information could not possibly have been contained in Martin Upton’s journal. Doyle suggests that it might be evidence of “spirit guides” and Houdini doesn’t have a ready retort. Logically, the implication is that Peter had, in fact, learned or deduced where Martin was buried, though how he might have done that is never addressed.
One of Houdini and Stratton’s “truth trades” involves each of them writing their greatest fear upon a scrap of paper, swapping papers and then reading each other’s answers (as it turns out, both of them fear “being unloved”). It’s later implied that this coincidence of written answers was a sleight-of-hand illusion on Houdini’s behalf; when Adelaide asks him whether it was a trick, he shows her a number of identical scraps of paper bearing different answers such as “losing family” and “spiders”. The suggestion is that he somehow matched his own answer to hers, out of a collection of likely responses (a cold reading-style application of the Barnum/Forer effect).

The “trick” as actually shown, however, would have relied entirely on luck or very shrewd guesswork; there was no possibility of a sleight-of-hand substitution of one scrap of paper for another. Perhaps the implication is that Houdini did not want to reveal the depth of his interest in Adelaide, and so sought to camouflage it (and give himself an “out”) by pretending that it actually was just a trick.

RATING:

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Seven out of ten ibangs for Episode 2 of this intriguing series.

“Harry Price: Ghost Hunter” (TV movie, reviewed)

Harry Price (1881-1948) was unquestionably the premiere paranormal investigator of early-mid 20th century England. This excellent website devoted to his career and legacy should be required reading for anyone interested in the ghost racket.

This 2015 ITV telemovie is very loosely based on Neil Spring’s HP-inspired novel, The Ghost Hunters (2013). In effect, being filtered through two different fictional media, the detail of the movie’s plot admits only a little historical accuracy; but of course, as a work of fiction it makes no claim of documentary realism and can only be fairly judged on its own merits.

The story opens with HP (Rafe Spall) conducting a dramatic seance at a home in London during, or very shortly after, the First World War. As it then transpires, Price has gimmicked the sitting for maximum spooky effect. Clearly, he is riding high as a ghost racketeer – until, shockingly, a disturbed young soldier who has bought into Price’s line of afterlife patter commits suicide right in front of him.

(Cut to the opening titles, a nice montage of the tools of the ghost-hunter’s trade – ’20s-vintage cameras, phonographs, metronomes and other such apparatus.)

Several years later, a sadder and wiser Harry Price has changed tack and is making his living as an investigator of seemingly paranormal phenomena, with the cloud of his former charlatanry hanging heavily about him. He is hired to investigate the strange case of Grace Goodwin (Zoe Boyle), the young wife of fast-rising Liberal MP Edward Goodwin (Tom Ward); Grace has recently been discovered wandering the streets of London, naked and disoriented, and seems to be suffering from a case of ghostly possession.

Price visits the couple’s home and quickly learns that it is a former workhouse. Sarah Goodwin’s strange visions seem to revolve around the ghost of a young boy who died there many years before.

HP is assigned the couple’s maid, Sarah Grey (Cara Theobold) as an assistant and discovers her to be a natural skeptic and a shrewd detective in her own right. Sarah has her own reason to distrust psychic mediums; her mother is a seance groupie, spending money they can’t afford in a series of attempts to contact her late husband. The point is effectively made that mediums, for all their frequent chicanery, were often the closest thing to therapists available to ordinary people during the early 20th century.

In an interlude from the main action, Price disrupts and debunks one of these public seances, for all the good it does; the true believers in the audience boo him off the stage and then the angry psychic strikes a nerve in aggressively cold reading Harry backstage, provoking Harry to knock him down. Eventually, we gather that Harry’s wife was sadly lost to insanity and that Harry seems to blame himself for not being able to help her.

Harry and Sarah proceed to puzzle out clues and mysteries towards discovering the real source of Mrs. Goodwin’s bizarre behaviour, calling upon the additional help of two of HP’s associates as the case becomes ever more convoluted.

Albert Ogoro (Richie Campbell) is a chemist by day and faux-voodoo witch-doctor by night. His main function in the story, other than to provide chemical analysis, is to illustrate another perspective on the ethics of the ghost racket. From Albert’s point of view, his clients are in such desperate straits that, if his sham-shamanism offers them some comfort, what’s the harm? He applies that logic in “assisting” Harry during a late-night vigil at the Goodwin home, but in this case his trickery (in the form of a rather implausible mechanical spider device secreted inside a grand piano) does no particular good.

Vernon Wall (Lewis Reeves), a hard-nosed young reporter who clearly has some unresolved “history” with Harry, nevertheless also agrees to help and tracks down a former secret lover of Mrs. Goodwin’s, whose presence in the Goodwins’ lives seems to have sparked the current dire situation. As it transpires, the politician is insanely possessive of his wife and, upon discovering her infidelity (and that she was pregnant with another man’s baby), he began secretly dosing her with home-brewed barbiturates, causing her to miscarry and then suffer terrifying hallucinations as she withdrew from the drug.

Goodwin reacts violently when Sarah confronts him with the truth and knocks her unconscious. Very curiously, as she comes to, she seems to see the same ghostly young boy who has been haunting Grace Goodwin. Charitably, it might be assumed that Sarah is now so deeply involved with the case that her imagination conjured a spectral child; less charitably, this vision reads as an incongruous “maybe it’s all true after all” cop-out on behalf of the writer. There’s no time to worry about that, though, as Mr. Goodwin has gone berserk and is attempting to drown his wife in the bath tub – but Harry Price arrives in the nick of time and saves the day.

The story ends with Harry inviting Sarah, who is now out of a job, to become his full-time assistant. She says she’ll think about it – leaving the way open for their adventures to be continued in some form, perhaps as a regular series …

RATING:

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Seven ibangs out of ten for this effective, atmospheric and well-acted ghost-hunter procedural.

“Fairy Tale: A True Story” (review)

This is what really happened; in 1917, and again in 1920, two rural English schoolgirl cousins went into the local woods and took photographs of paper cutouts shaped like fairies. All historical evidence suggests that the girls intended nothing more than a simple, silly prank, which then spiraled out of their control. As one of them said, much later in life, “I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun. I can’t understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in.”

“They” were the True Believers; Theosophists and Spiritualists, wonder-seekers championed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who took the Cottingley fairy photographs as clear proof of the existence of the supernatural. To a nation reeling from the devastation of the First World War, the photographs offered a glimmer of hope “beyond the veil”; if fairies were real, then perhaps death did not equal the extinction of identity.

Fairy Tale: A True Story is a clever, subtle and deeply compassionate examination of the nature of faith and skepticism during this very turbulent time. Each major character has his or her own perspective on the fairies. To Sir Arthur, for example, they represent the possibility of life beyond death and the vindication of his own father, who spent many years confined in a “lunatic asylum” and who frequently painted and wrote of seeing fairies.

To arch-skeptic Harry Houdini, who fought hard to expose the exploitation of the bereaved by fraudulent mediums, they represent a clever magic trick; an ultimately harmless and charming illusion.

Gardner, the Theosophist, comes up with increasingly far-fetched, pseudo-scientific theories about the fairies’ true natures.

To the comically nasty and cynical reporter, Mr. Ferret – who is, other than Houdini, the only adult who figures out how the photographs were actually produced – the fairies are a juicy story, perhaps part of a conspiracy orchestrated by Sir Arthur.

Several charming sequences show actual fairies flitting about, the director wisely leaving it ambiguous as to whether these scenes are intended to be taken literally, or more in the poetic spirit of Peter Pan’s urgent plea to “clap if you believe in fairies!”

It is also implied that the girls themselves come to realize the power of their own myth-making, as when they are shown making a solemn “vow of fairy secrecy”, which can either be interpreted as a promise not to reveal the magical secrets of real fairies, or as a promise not to reveal the simple trickery that has accidentally deceived the famous Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and so many others. At several points, when they are asked point-blank “are the fairies real?” by people for whom belief in fairies is clearly of great emotional importance, they exchange knowing looks before kindly nodding their heads.

RATING:

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Nine ibangs out of ten for this underrated modern classic.

Houdini and Doyle, Episode 1: The Maggie’s Redress (Reviewed)

The ten-part Edwardian mystery/drama/action series Houdini and Doyle teams friendly rivals Harry Houdini (Michael Weston) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Stephen Mangan) as freelance investigators of crimes that appear to have a supernatural slant.

The first episode begins with a murder of a senior nun in one of London’s notorious Magdalene laundries, in which young women – often unmarried mothers – were effectively imprisoned and forced to work. The twist is that the murderer is said to have been the ghost of a former “Maggie”, or young resident, who had been cruelly tormented by some of the nuns and had died some six months previously.

Both arch-skeptic Houdini and true believer Doyle are fascinated by the case because of its apparently otherworldly nature, but there the similarities end. Houdini is convinced that a mortal murderer has exploited the laundry’s resident ghost story to cover their tracks, whereas Doyle is equally convinced that a restless spirit is to blame.

Essentially bullying their way in to the Scotland Yard investigation on the strength of their celebrity, they are assigned the help of the progressive and forthright Adelaide Stratton (Rebecca Liddiard), the Yard’s first female police constable, by a condescending Detective Inspector who wishes to be rid of both H&D’s amateur sleuthing and of his female constable. The Inspector, of course, has significantly underestimated Houdini, Doyle and Stratton, who combine their talents to solve the mystery behind the bloody crimes.

As it turns out, Houdini was right; the motive for murder was personal and punitive revenge. The murderer exploited the ghost story to cover her tracks and hoped to establish a legend that might, perversely, lead to less cruelty by the Magdalene nuns in the future.

Observations:

The Maggie’s Redress is an effective procedural that strikes all the requisite beats at a rapid clip, including numerous allusions to the lives of the real Houdini and Doyle while also playing very fast and loose indeed with historical accuracy. Although Houdini and Doyle were, in reality, friends and mutual admirers, they did not actually meet until the 1920s. That friendship only lasted a few years, ending acrimoniously due to their vehement disagreements about the reality of spiritualistic phenomena. That said, their fictional relationship in the show is layered and the interplay between Doyle’s optimistic embrace of all things numinous and Houdini’s rational humanism is well portrayed.
The character of constable Adelaide Stratton is fictional and, in real history, the first female constables in London were not appointed until the outbreak of the First World War, some fifteen years after the period portrayed in Houdini and Doyle.
Some of the dialogue is painfully anachronistic – no more so than when Houdini seemingly coins the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” some eighty years before it actually gained any currency – but the sets, costumes and other production design elements are all effectively evocative of London circa 1900. Everything is ultimately explained, though the rationales for some of those explanations do strain credibility; if you like the show you may be inclined to forgive those trespasses, and if not, they’ll probably bother you.

All in all, The Maggie’s Redress is an enjoyable if lightweight 45 minutes’ worth of entertainment, noteworthy for its nuanced treatment of skepticism and gullibility. We look forward to the remaining nine episodes of this intriguing new series.

Rating:

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With all due ceremony, we award episode 1 of the Houdini and Doyle series a total of seven ibangs out of a possible ten (note – one full ibang deducted for “garbage in, garbage out”).