Educational Media Reviews Online

This splendidly made film is artistic, imaginative, and entertaining even as it reports the facts about filmmaker Ann Fleming’s search to learn the true story of her great grandfather’s life, professional magician Long Tack Sam. Ms. Fleming wants most to discover how anyone as famous as Long Tack Sam could disappear into thin air and be forgotten only a few decades after enjoying the uppermost heights of celebrity.

Long Tack Sam was close to many famous entertainers we still remember, such as the Marx Brothers and Orson Welles, whom he mentored, although few people today have heard of Sam. His career spanned more than three decades, coinciding with the rise and fall of vaudeville. At its height, Sam assembled a troupe of dozens of acrobats and illusionists with all their associated animals, equipment, costumes, props, and paraphernalia, and did gigs in large and small cities on several continents, including North America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. He and his family toured the world, appearing before thousands of wildly enthusiastic audiences.

Ms. Fleming discovers that Long Tack Sam had not one but many personal “histories.” At different moments in his life, he claimed to have been apprenticed to a kindly magician, run away from home to get away from a tormenting older brother who forced him to practice acrobatics, and to have struck out from his tiny village to find his calling, magic, quite by accident. No matter which story is the true one, Sam obviously had great streaks of good luck as well as exceptional proficiency in a calling that requires enormous discipline and physical agility.

The outstanding production successfully melds interviews, still photographs, and truly innovative animation with live action shots of Ms. Fleming’s trips to the United States, China, England, and the Continent where she sees for herself the places her ancestor lived and worked. She takes viewers to many tiny museums of magic and conjuring, lovingly tended by the descendants of practitioners and devotees, and finds some of his glorious costumes, playbills, etc. The saddest moment is when Chinese officials refuse to allow Fleming to visit the village where Sam was born and grew up. Viewers will be as astonished and unhappy as Ms. Fleming must have been when told her visa would not allow her to cross a provincial border to go there - just a short distance from the town she originally thought was the right one.

Ms. Fleming suggests that a few critical decisions - avoiding films, which portrayed Chinese people as evil, marrying interracially, and retiring to Germany - may have caused his fame to evaporate. She finally concludes, with satisfaction: “All history is relatives.”

Highly recommended for all audiences, especially for young adults studying personal history, immigration and emigration, and racial issues.