Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!
There’s a part of me that realizes Vincent Price had a career before he started doing horror movies in the mid-‘50s. If memory serves, House of Wax was his first true horror movie, which makes The Mad Magician from 1954 his second. It’s interesting to see him this early in his career, still clearly the great Vincent Price, but also still feeling his way in the genre. To be fair, The Mad Magician is barely a horror movie. Additionally, while it conjures up thoughts of magician suffering from insanity, in truth he’s really just angry.
Price plays Don Gallico, who makes a living creating illusions for other magicians. He’s gotten an itch to perform on the stage, though, and calling himself Gallico the Great, he decides to put on a show featuring a new trick. This trick is a version of sawing a lady in half, but features a huge buzzsaw set up to behead the assistant.
Along with creating new tricks, Gallico also has a penchant for impersonation, and so does the first part of his show in the guise and with the voice of magician The Great Rinaldi (John Emery). Just as Gallico is getting ready to debut the buzzsaw trick with his assistant Karen (Mary Murphy), the show is shut down by Ross Ormand (Donald Randolph) and his lawyer. It seems that due to his contract, everything that Gallico creates belongs to Ormand and the magicians he wants to give those tricks to. This includes the buzzsaw, which Ormand decides should belong to Rinaldi.
The next day, Gallico is visited at his shop by Karen’s boyfriend, police detective Alan Bruce (Patrick O’Neal), who confirms that Gallico’s contract states that everything he creates belongs to Ormand’s company. Just then, Rinaldi and Ormand arrive and are shown the inner workings of the buzzsaw trick. Rinadi leaves, and Ormand stays behind to gloat. We learn that Ormand is now married to Gallico’s ex-wife, Claire (Eva Gabor). Overcome by anger and seeming to lose everything he wants to Ormand, Gallico overpowers the man, puts him into the buzzsaw trick and operates it without engaging the trick, thus decapitating the man.
Wanting revenge on Rinaldi, Gallico now turns to his talent of impersonation and starts setting up plans to make sure that he, dressed as Ormand, is seen more or less killing Rinaldi and Ormand’s wife. Naturally, since this was made in 1954, we can’t have the bad guy get away with his crimes, so we know there’s eventually going to be a reckoning. It’s all about getting there.
There are some really good ideas at the heart of The Mad Magician. There’s a reason that plenty of horror movies use magic as a backdrop for much of what they do. There’s something fun and mysterious about magic, as well as there being a sense of magic touching on evil or dark forces better left untapped. We have no pretense here that there is real magic. In the case of the buzzsaw trick, we’re told how it’s going to work. The later trick that Gallico creates, which involves a gas-powered furnace that reaches a temperature of 3500 degrees (no indication of how people can stand that close to it on stage) is also fully explained. There’s not a hint of the supernatural here—just a veneer of magic to hold the narrative while we watch Don Gallico get revenge on the people who have wronged him, and while Detective Bruce more or less teaches a class in how fingerprints work, something that turns out to be worked into the plot in a really interesting way.
The Mad Magician isn’t bad; it’s just completely harmless. The ideas here are interesting, and while revenge plots aren’t new, the idea of a revenge story coming from business dealings is a nice twist. And, honestly, magic is cool, and it’s worked into the plot well, as are all of Gallico’s disguises.
The problem is that it’s too short. There’s a sequence just after the murder of Ormand that seems like it’s going to fast-forward the plot. While cleaning up the buzzsaw trick, Gallico is visited by Karen, who leaves her bag and walks out with the one holding Ormand’s head, a bag that she accidentally leaves in a hansom cab. When that cab is tracked down, they discover that the cab driver gave the bag to a cop. And then, suddenly, this plot is over; Gallico has the bag back with no consequences.
Incidents like this feel undeveloped and should have had something more or different done with them. Another 15 minutes and these subplots could be built out, and it would serve the movie better than what we have here. The Mad Magician is fine, but it could be more.
Why to watch The Mad Magician: Mustache-less Vincent Price.
Why not to watch: It’s ultimately kind of silly.