The Reincarnation of Peter Proud by Max Ehrlich

You keep wishing Thompson would get his act together and generate some of the relentless suspense of Cape Fear. What it feels like is less a slick, well-produced studio film than a ploddingly earnest tv movie treatment of reincarnation themes. Immediately after you start watching, any anticipation is killed off by an incredibly sedate pace on the part of J. Certainly, it is made with an A-polish sheen that carried it to audience appeal back in the day. I had heard about The Reincarnation of Peter Proud for many years before getting around to seeing it. Peter Proud (Michael Sarrazin) discovers the grave of his past life self His career of the late 1970s through the 1980s is marked by a series of oddities and flops such as The White Buffalo (1977), The Greek Tycoon (1978) and the slasher film Happy Birthday to Me (1981) before ending up at Cannon Films for a slew of Charles Bronson action vehicles and their single worst film King Solomon’s Mines (1985). Thompson moved through a series of A-budget films for the US studios with the likes of Taras Bulba (1962), McKenna’s Gold (1968) and two Planet of the Apes sequels. Lee Thompson was a British director who found his feet in quota quickies during the 1950s before having the big international box-office hit of The Guns of Navarone (1961) and quickly being brought to the US to make Cape Fear (1962), one of the great thrillers of the era. These have included episodes of genre series such as Tales of Tomorrow (1951-3), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-8) and The Wild Wild West (1965-9), even an episode of Star Trek with The Apple (1966), as well as one science-fiction film, the over-populated future dystopia Z.P.G (Zero Population Growth) (1971). Ehrlich had written a number of other novels and a good many scripts for radio and television.

The film was based on the novel The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1973) by Max Ehrlich, which proved to be a modest best-seller. (For a more detailed overview of the theme see Reincarnation Films). Among these, there was also two serious, studio-backed treatments of reincarnation themes with The Reincarnation of Peter Proud here and the subsequent Audrey Rose (1977). The 1970s also saw the rise of the occult film with successes such as Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973) popularising a fascination with black magic and devil worship.

We saw the rise of the LSD films in the 60s, the popularisation of the UFO film in the 1970s (and a host of nutty ideas that went along with it). It is no particular surprise then that the film and popular literature of the decade reflected this. The 1970s was the Age of Aquarius, the era that followed on from the 1960s and its experiments with alternate religions and states of expanded consciousness.

The Reincarnation of Peter Proud by Max Ehrlich