Director: J. Lee Thompson
Cast: Michael Sarrzin, Jennifer O'Neill, Margot Kidder, Cornelia Sharpe

I like to think about many different things in my down time, not just the fact that I think about the fact I like to think about many different things. One of the many things I like to think about is if there is some kind of Great Beyond or not. After we have breathed our last breath in this mortal world, what happens to us? Well, I know our mortal remains will return to the Earth whence they came from, but what happens to our soul, our consciousness, or whatever you wish to call it? I think I've mentioned before that I think there is some place where we go to after we die, because I have thought about it over and over, and I can't imagine myself being completely wiped out of existence. I am here right now, and I can't imagine that fact will chance drastically any time in the future. But to be fair to all the naysayers, I do realize that there are some strong arguments against this way of thinking. There is the fact that there are so many different religions and philosophies in the world, and there just isn't any general agreement on many things surrounding man's mortality. There is also the fact that I can't explain how my consciousness came out of nowhere in the first place. That last question has vexed me for ages, and I have searched for answers. Once I had an encounter with a psychic, and I let her "read" me, since she offered to do it for free. She told me after reading me that I had a previous life where I was a figure of authority, and one day I was killed by an axe to the back by some disgruntled person. She couldn't tell me much more than that, but to this day I keep her claims in my mind, and wonder why, if the claims are true, my killer did what he did to me.

As you can see from what I was discussing in the previous paragraph - and no doubt also from the title of the movie I am reviewing here - there is the theory of reincarnation, which has existed for thousands of years. But to this day, it's no more than a theory, and has never been proven for sure by anybody. Personally, I sometimes would like this theory to be true, because not only would it answer some big questions in my mind, it would assure me that I would go on after I die. But it seems that every attempt to prove the theory has been debunked. One of the most notorious examples of this happened in 1956, where hypnotist Morey Bernstein published a book called The Search For Bridey Murphy. In the book, Bernstein told about his account of hypnotizing a woman named Virginia Tighe, asking her during the session about her past life. During the session, she told him that she was once a woman named Bridey Murphy in Ireland, being born in 1798 and gave various details of her past life such as her marriage and childhood. When the book was published, it caused a sensation, inspiring a quickly-made movie of the same name, and even better, upsetting a lot of stern and inflexble relgious leaders. However, when other parties started to research the claims of the book, they uncovered some interesting facts. They couldn't find any Irish records of the existence of Bridey Murphy, for starters. Also, the claim of "Bridey" that she scratched off the paint off her metal frame bed as a child as revenge for a punishment by her parents lost credibility when it was revealed Tighe did the same thing as a child... as well as the uncovered fact that there were no metal frame beds in Ireland in the early 1800s. Also, it was revealed that Tighe in her childhood had a neighbor named Bridie Murphy Corkell. All these and other revelations soon deflated the public interest in the book and its claims.

Maybe it's just as well that reincarnation has not been definitely proven. I can't think of what I would ultimately do if someone or something proved what life I had lived in the past. Especially if it was in the far past - you can't very well change history. But this idea of doing something upon realizing reincarnation is intriguing, and is the premise behind The Reincarnation Of Peter Proud, which explains why I was interested in giving it a look when the opportunity arose. As you probably guessed, the main character of the movie is a man named Peter Proud (Michael Sarrazin, The Peacekeeper), who is a college professor in California. He has a good life with his job and his girlfriend Nora (Cornelia Sharpe, Busting). But then his nights become haunted by visions of an unidentified place where he sees a man being murdered while swimming by a woman in a rowboat. A visit to a sleep laboratory gives Peter no answers except for the fact that what he seems to be experiencing don't seem to be bona fide dreams. But one day, via a coincidence, he learns that the location of the place he has been haunted by is a real place in Massachusetts. So Peter takes a trip to Massachusetts, and eventually find in the town of Springfield some of the locations that Peter has seen in his visions. And not too long afterwards, Peter finds Springfield resident Marcia (Margot Kidder, Quackser Fortune Has A Cousin In The Bronx), who looks exactly like the murderous woman in his visions. Marcia doesn't take to Peter well, especially after he meets and strikes a romance with her daughter Ann (Jennifer O'Neill, Whiffs). But Peter is determined to find out just what Marcia might know about the man he's had visions of, even if it might be dangerous for him to try and find the answer.

As I mentioned earlier in this review, reincarnation hasn't been definitely proven, either to me or anyone else for this matter. So when I sat down to watch The Reincarnation Of Peter Proud, one thing I was extremely interested in seeing was its depiction of reincarnation - would it be plausible and engaging despite the theory of the phenomenon not yet proven or disproven? Well, the movie managed to portray reincarnation to me that more interested me than had me questioning it. The only real quibble I had was with the dreams and visions the Peter Proud character had. In these dreams and visions, he usually sees his past life with the viewpoint of an outside observer, not from seeing his past life from the first-person eyes of his past life. But thinking about this, this may have been a necessary flaw, so that us viewers in the audience would clearly see what Proud's past life did for himself and towards others. Otherwise, the reincarnation angle is quite acceptable, coming across as plausible in this particular cinematic world. Director J. Lee Thompson (10 To Midnight) offers further compensation in other areas of the movie as well. Before getting into that, I do have to confess that there are a significant number of scenes that abruptly end before it seems the characters (or us the audience for that matter) can properly absorb what has just happened or what has just been learned, though I am willing to consider the theory that editor Michael F. Anderson (The White Buffalo) might be at fault here. Also, a few scenes have a feeling like they are right out of a 1970s made for television production. But Thompson makes up for this by injecting a fairly steady slight uneasiness into the story, an uneasiness that occasionally and suddenly rears its head up to deliver genuine jolts. It certainly helps that the background musical score by Jerry Goldsmith (Lionheart) is very effective. It's an atypical score for Goldsmith, mixing in standard orchestra instruments with electronic instruments, and the mix adds a creepy backdrop at times.

Getting back to Thompson's direction, he not only shakes up the audience, at the same time he gets the audience really interested in finding out what is going on and what the characters do when they are faced with a new situation. There's a great scene where Proud contemplates asking the police for help but imagining what might happen, and later when Marcia suddenly realizes the secret that Proud was keeping from her. The characters in this movie are smarter for the most part than you might expect, not just because of the script but with also how the performers play these parts. While actress Margot Kidder may have just received a grey wig and not much more to dress up her older woman character Marcia, Kidder compensates for this by taking the scripting of Marcia - who is old but not stupid - and really making us believe Marcia can see signs of her late husband. Her subsequent terror from realizing the long dead are being dug up is very believable as well. Other supporting characters come off well. For example, Proud's girlfriend Nora, while a doubting Thomas, does all the same support Proud at first, until finally getting tired of the matter, all of which is believable due to another combination of smart writing and acting. As for the character of Proud, while there are some flaws to it (which I will shortly list), it is often an interesting character. Proud is smart, seeing patterns in his dreams, and being a careful detective going step by step slowly. At the same time, however, he is kind of an empty figure, though I am not getting into the flaws of his character yet. Proud seems to have no past, no real affection for his girlfriend, and doesn't seem to be exceptional at his teaching position. It's no wonder then when he starts to get the visions of his past life, he immediately clings to them and tries to find out everything of his past life, as a way to give himself some past, some purpose.

As Proud, actor Michael Sarrazin often gives a kind of bland performance, though that may have been intentional to illustrate what I said before of his character lacking pizzazz. However, his character has a few weaknesses, one being that we can't really see what's in his mind at key points. The fact that his romance with Ann - his daughter in a past life - treads on pseudo-incestuous grounds doesn't seem to concern him that much or make him think, and he quickly and completely forgets about his original girlfriend Nora. There are other problems to be found with the script. It's never made clear why Proud in his middle-aged years suddenly started to get visions of his past life. Also, when the movie starts, the dreams have been going on for months, but his live-in girlfriend Nora has for some reason not noticed these dreams up to then. Later, Proud gets some clues practically handed to him on a plate that help him narrow down where and when he lived his past life (oh, there's a theory brought up for these coincidences, but it's very unconvincing.) There are a few other examples of moments hard to swallow, but I won't bother to list them so that I have space to talk about another kind of flaw found in the script, that being in the last third or so of the movie, things pretty much slow to a halt for an extended period. I admit that during this portion of the movie I wasn't bored, but all the same I could see that not much of consequence was happening there. But flaws and all, I wasn't bored for a moment with The Reincarnation Of Peter Proud, and even when those flaws were unfolding, my interest in the movie didn't really dip down significantly. It's a good enough movie that I really hope that the fairly recent plans of some Hollywood movie producers to reincarnate the movie via a remake don't pan out.

(Posted November 9, 2024)