Entering the Water and Escaping...

 

ENTERING THE WATER AND ESCAPING:

FROM HOUDINI TO THE HOODOO SEA

“What was the Unspeakable Secret of the SEA OF LOST SHIPS?”

                                    *Poster for Creature from the Haunted Sea

It’s common knowledge that Houdini planned to reach out 

after death and contact this world of the living again. 

But did Bogart plan the same escape? And did he succeed, 

channeled into the part of a way-below B-movie actor in 

a film entitled Creature from the Haunted Sea?

 

“If it’s possible for anyone to get through after 

death, that person will be me.” This was the vow 

of showman/magician/ultraman Harry Houdini. 

Time after time, across the country, around the world, 

he defeated death by out-smarting it. Whether locking 

himself underwater in a safe, enduring The Water 

Torture Cell, or throwing himself bound in chains 

into an icy river, he came out alive again. 

Water was his favorite element to challenge, 

though he was known to hang tied upside-down 

in the air, or while staging another feat in California, 

he confessed, “I tried out ‘Buried Alive’ in Hollywood, 

and nearly did it. Very dangerous; the weight of the 

earth is killing.” (1) Then in 1919, he ventured into 

the early life of motion pictures, which he saw as 

realizing “the American ideal of speed and 

activity.” (2) 

 

His movie The Man from Beyond promised, “A man 

Entombed in a Massive Casket of Ice 100 Years 

Comes Back to Life. The Weirdest and Most 

Sensational Love Story Ever Screened” and 

featured his famous dethawing act from vaudeville. 

His experience conquering water even allowed him 

to share his Promethean knowledge, patenting a 

new and improved deep sea diving suit “arranged 

to permit the diver, in case of danger for any cause 

whatever, to quickly divest himself of the suit 

while being submerged and to safely escape 

and reach the surface of the water.” (3) 

But when he died in Detroit on the Halloween 

of 1926, contact was lost. “The ordinary people 

of Europe and America mourned the death of 

Houdini, but they knew of his promise to 

come back. It was said that in the manner 

of his return he would demonstrate immortality 

so vividly that no one would ever be able to 

disbelieve again and all the world would be 

converted.” (4) For ten years his wife Bess 

worked the air in séances (the very thing Houdini 

crusaded against, the spotlight of fraud mediums 

and phony spiritualists), reaching for the ten word 

code she would know him by, finding  nothing 

before she finally let him go. Where are you? 

What more could she do? This mystery of 

human existence seemed to baffle her. 

Winds blew, curtains fell, magic stopped, 

things were laid to rest.

            Is life after death possible, probable, 

more than the mystical, or the ravings of B-movies 

and pulp dreamers? Time. Reception reaches. 

Across the continent, over an ocean, up mountains 

to Tibet where life and death have been the hum of 

meditation for well over a thousand passing years. 

“In nature an embodiment of the ocean of buddhas/ 

With concentrated attention I call to you:/Send out 

waves of your compassionate energy.” (5) In 1933, 

after the 13th Dalai Lama wrote these verses, he 

passed away and the search was on to find him 

again.

            Reincarnation is the path he follows. 

In the words of the Buddha of Compassion: 

“Both mind and body must have immediate 

sources…the immediate source of a body is 

that of its parents. But physical matter cannot 

produce mind, nor mind matter. The immediate 

source of a mind must, therefore, be a mind 

which existed before the conception took place; 

the mind must have a continuity from a previous 

mind. This we hold to prove the existence of 

a past life.” (6)

            So how could anyone discover, or 

rediscover this great man who returned to life? 

Lake Lhamo Lhatso held the answer. “The people 

of Tibet believe that visions of the future can be 

seen in the waters of this lake…Sometimes the 

visions are said to appear in the form of letters, 

and sometimes as pictures of places and future 

events.” (7) Houdini’s ten word code come to life. 

The blue sky on water revealed the clues and 

in 1937, after four years out of sight, the 14th 

Dalai Lama was found, a two year old boy 

under a turquoise roof, who knew who he was.

 

           

 “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”

                                    *John Keats’ tombstone

            In the meantime, America continued. 

Only 18, while Harry Houdini was making his 

first movies, Seaman Humphrey Bogart floated 

the ocean aboard the Leviathan. The U-Boats let 

him pass back and forth unsunk and after the war 

he drifted, closer to where he would become. 

Trying his hand at directing a film called Life 

was the opening door for him to act. Parts in 

plays and early pictures followed, then it happened: 

from the stage production of The Petrified Forest 

his gangster character was projected over theater 

screens in 1936. Going rough through the 

Depression into the next war years, reflecting 

the time-culture in the roles that made him bright, 

Bogart was created. “To his cynicism, his own 

code of ethics, his hatred of the phoniness in all 

human behavior, he now added the softening trait 

of tenderness and compassion and a feeling of 

heroic commitment to a cause.” (8)

 

            Like Houdini’s water shows, Bogart 

seemed to truly glow when he was filmed on 

the ocean. To Have and Have Not (1945), 

Key Largo (1948), The African Queen (1951) 

put Bogart on the waves and it’s real, he’s in 

control, steering the careening boat around 

danger. It’s that vision of him that is timeless. 

At his funeral services in 1957, a glass display 

case holding the model of his yacht The Santana 

took the place of a coffin and the whistle from 

To Have and Have Not was interred with his 

ashes. Director John Huston decided, “He is 

quite unreplaceable. There will never be anybody 

like him.” Sealing Bogart’s memorial was 

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘Crossing the Bar,’ 

tolling Time and sea: “But such a tide as moving 

seems asleep,/Too full for sound and foam,/

When that which drew from out the boundless 

deep/Turns again home.”

 

“Everything is wrong…strange…We can’t be 

sure of any direction. Even the ocean doesn’t 

look as it should.”

        *Flight Leader, Flight 19, gone in 1945.

            Roger Corman was born in 1926, 

the year Houdini died. After he served in the navy, 

he made his first film The Monster from the 

Ocean Floor in 1954. Fiendishly, he returned 

again and again to explore the power from water. 

There was The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues 

(1956): “SHEER HORROR as a living nightmare 

stalks the ocean floor!” “See! The battle for life 

at the bottom of the sea!” and Attack of the Crab 

Monsters (1957): “From the depths of the sea…

A TIDAL WAVE OF TERROR!” So it was only 

natural that he would be drawn to The Hoodoo Sea.

 

            “The Bermuda Triangle is a stretch of 

the Atlantic Ocean bordered by a line from Florida 

to the islands of Bermuda, to Puerto Rico and then 

back to Florida.” (9) However, disappearances of 

ships and aircraft have strayed well beyond this 

anomalous area, to include the Caribbean island 

Martinique, location of To Have and Have Not. 

One year after that film was shot, in the winter 

of 1945, the five Avengers of Flight 19, a 

Flight Leader and 13 other men, were lost off 

the Florida Keys. Bogart and Bacall would return 

to this very place in three years for the making 

of Key Largo.

            What brought Roger Corman to The 

Bermuda Triangle were the tax incentives. 

Arriving in Puerto Rico in 1961, he quickly 

directed The Last Woman on Earth and produced 

Battle of Blood Island. Then, with a week before 

the crew had to return to America, he decided, 

why not direct one more film?

            Whereas Bogart had script writers like 

Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, 

William Faulkner and Truman Capote, 

Roger Corman had Charles B. Griffith, a man 

who had set new standards in black-comedy 

with his screenplays Bucket of Blood (1954) 

and Little Shop of Horrors (1960). Corman 

remembered telephoning the States, “‘Chuck, 

I need another comedy-horror film and you’ve 

got a week to write it…There’s no time for 

rewrites. I’ve got a small cast so write for them’…

He was very sleepy and I wasn’t certain he 

understood completely the story line we 

discussed, but he agreed.” (10)

            The result, Corman confessed was 

“truly insane.” Inspired by the nearby revolution 

of Fidel Castro, Creature from the Haunted Sea 

“was a story about a band of Batista’s generals 

making off with a treasure chest of gold from 

Cuba. The man they hire to captain their boat 

is a mobster. He murders the generals and 

covers up the crimes by inventing a story 

about an undersea monster who devours people. 

But there is an undersea monster.” (11)

 

            Corman’s monster is none other than 

the $150 creation of soundman/actor Beach 

Dickerson who shares: “I decide to get five 

helmets and make this giant head. Then we 

get a wetsuit, some moss, lots of Brillo pads. 

Then we get tennis balls for the eyes. Ping-Pong 

balls for the pupils, and pipecleaners for the 

claws. Then we cover him with black oilcloth 

to make him look slimy. I mean, we decked 

him out and he was absolutely glorious. 

And I must say, that son of a bitch, he ran on 

land and swam underwater for the whole 

shoot and when it was all over he went to 

heaven.” (12)

            The monster is telling of the production 

itself, tossed together in a rush of crazed inspiration, 

allowing what’s around to influence. It is seeing 

the movie inside someone’s head…someone 

sleeping in the shade of the Bermuda Triangle. 

What a shock when into this dream assembly 

suddenly appears an Academy Award winning 

icon. Pulled through, after four years out of 

sight, Humphrey Bogart is back.

 

            His first utterance in the dark under palms 

is, “I am,” followed by, “Let’s get on with it.” 

Renzo Capeto, American gambler, gangster and 

yachtsman is Bogart’s incarnation, though at 

times it seems his actor Anthony Carbone 

struggles to control the possession. The same 

posturing body language, the cigarette going, 

the sailor hat, the toughness, the smiles, his gaze, 

mannerisms and speech patterns. How could you 

possibly make a boat movie with gangsters in 

black and white and not invite Bogart? 

The plot was right, the place, the boat, 

everything agreed. It was an open door 

awaiting his reappearance.

 

             So, coasting with the perfect ghost, 

the boat floats right into the plot of To Have and 

Have Not. As in that earlier film, while hoping to 

look like a fishing vessel, their mission has been 

discovered by a patrol boat and The Bogart 

of both films arms his deck hands for trouble. 

“Now let’s appear casual,” he orders in 1961 

and, “Mary Belle, sing a song.” Hoagy Carmichael 

backed Lauren Bacall, but Mary Belle has an 

out-of-the-blue piano track to  make up a 

love song, as she bobs along. A shooting match 

erupts again and they escape again. Even the 

beyond-odd character Pete Peterson Jr, an 

animal mimic, is an impaired exaggeration of 

Walter Brennan’s Eddy, with his dead bee routine. 

Boat full of thieves, the cramped onboard camera 

work resembles Key Largo, while Renzo plots 

for the chance to take over their course, and 

soon does.

            But this is the Bermuda Triangle, 

a mysterious and dangerous place, unpredictable, 

as the theatrical trailer for To Have and Have Not 

already warned: “The danger zone of the 

Mid-Atlantic where strange ships slip through 

the fog with even stranger cargoes…where all 

barriers are down and the only law is the law 

of the Caribbean.”

            Prescient, in what amounts to his 

swansong, Creature’s Bogart echoes Tennyson 

in his conversation with an equally fated 

Cuban colonel, dreams of what to do, where 

to go next:

            “You can go anywhere you like. I’m 

going home.”

            “To America?”

            “America? No, I can’t go back there 

anymore.”

            True, his encore appearance is over, 

he’s bound for some unseen shore. The monster 

roars out of the water, there’s no place to get 

away, and The Bogart runs out of life on the 

beach, unable to move, staring at the sky.

 

Footnotes (Stock Footage):

(1) The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini, 

Ruth Brandon, Kodansha International, NY, 

1993, page 151.

(2) Ibid, page 196.

(3) Houdini U.S Patent # 1,370,316 granted 

March 1, 1921. Quoted from   

www.magictricks.com/Houdini

(4) Death and the Magician: The Mystery of 

Houdini, Raymond Fitzsimons, Atheneum, 

NY, 1981, page 163.

(5) The Fourteen Dalai Lamas: A Sacred 

Legacy of Reincarnation, Glenn H. Mullin, 

Clear Light Publishers, Sante Fe, New Mexico, 

2001, page 448.

(6) My Land and My People, His Holiness 

the Dalai Lama of Tibet, McGraw-Hill 

Book Co. Inc., NY, 1962, page 236.

(7) Ibid, page 21-22.

(8) Humphrey Bogart, Alan G. Barbour, 

Galahad Books, NY, 1973, page 96.

(9) www.unmuseum.org/triangle.htm

(10) How I Made A Hundred Movies in 

Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime, 

Roger Corman, Random House, NY, 1990, 

page 71.

(11) Ibid, page 237.

(12) Ibid, page 73.

Essay by Allen Frost