L'INNOCENTE 1976

The hands of 69-year-old director Luchino Visconti are shown turning the pages of the 1892 Gabriele D'Annunzio novel upon which this, Visconti's final film, is based. 

During the pandemic lockdown of 2020, between panic attacks and bouts of binge-eating, I also managed to find time to watch a great many wonderful movies. A year-long, borderless flow from night to day provided the perfect conditions for indulging my passion for the long-form motion pictures: aka movies with lengthy running times. With no worries about having to get up early the next day (indeed, at the height of lockdown, “next day” was more an abstract concept than a reality), I breezed through Bergman’s 5hr 26min Fanny & Alexander; aced Scorsese’s 3hr 30min The Irishman, and Kubrick’s 3hr 7min Barry Lyndon felt like it was over before I’d even settled into my chair. 

Of particular interest and appeal to me during this period were the films of Luchino Visconti. And not simply because he’s a director whose visually sumptuous epics are as heedless of time constraints as I suddenly found myself to be. No, given the almost surreal socio-political climate of America in 2020, I drew ceaseless comfort and solace from Visconti's flagrant surrender to beauty and staunch respect for intelligence. But chiefly I reveled in the vehement strain of anti-Fascism that underscore the narratives of the deeply poetic and majestic films made by the late Italian director. His films--each a repudiation of moral ugliness and spiritual ignorance--were like an anchor to a sane and humane world that was slipping away.

I revisited old favorites: Death in Venice, Ludwig, The Damned, and Conversation Piece. And I also discovered a treasure trove of heretofore unseen-by-me masterworks that further solidified in my mind the conviction that Visconti is unsurpassed as cinema's painterly pundit of aristocratic foibles. A peerless chronicler of corrupted ideals and self-immolating passions. Each newly discovered (and gloriously restored) film felt richer than the last: Ossessione, Rocco & His Brothers, Senso, & The Leopard --his final film, the tragic L’Innocente, catching me totally off guard by being far more poetically moving than I'd expected. 

Giancarlo Giannini as Tullio Hermil

Jennifer O'Neill as Countess Teresa Raffo

Laura Antonelli as Giuliana Hermil

Marc Porel as Filippo d'Arborio

Italian aristocrat Tullio Hermil (Giannini) is the self-styled embodiment of Nietzsche’s Higher Man. A handsome, athletic gentleman of wealth, intelligence, and taste who, by nature of his philosophical beliefs and self-discerned status as a superior being, answers to no man, no social mores, and certainly no god. An avowed atheist, Tulio professes to be a self-regulating free man and free-thinker. One whose idleness of occupation (coupled with a self-serving disdain for convention) affords the unimpeded indulgence of all manner of hedonistic pursuits and sensual gratifications...all outside of the confines of his marriage.  

Given his libertine worldview, Tullio’s marriage to the docile and religiously devout Giuliana (Antonelli) suggests, at first glance, a contradiction. That is, until one is reminded that all narcissists require a mirror. And in the eyes of Giuliana—who remains somewhat masochistically devoted to him in the face of countless infidelities and humiliations—Tullio sees the confirmation of his superior image of himself. Ascribing nobility to Guiliana’s martyred suffering, Tullio reasons that if a woman so good and pure of heart can love a man who gives so little and treats her so shabbily, then that man must be a great man, indeed.

Übermensch or Überjerk?
After informing Giuliana of his plans to take temporary leave with his mistress, Tullio takes a moment to overshare ("No woman has ever succeeded in seducing me like she does") before asking her to remain his wife and be there for him as platonic companion and confessor.

But as is so often the case with individuals harboring a God complex (or Yeezus complex, for that matter); Tullio’s professed self-possession is simply self-absorption left to flourish in the absence of either introspection or self-awareness. And it’s Tullio’s arrogant lack of self-awareness that proves to be the source of his unexpected anguish when, after abandoning Giuliana for the beautiful Teresa Raffo (O’Neill)—a widowed countess arguably as independent-minded as Tullio, but lacking his gift for self-deception—he begins to suspect his wife of having fallen in love with Filippo d’Arborio, a dashing author (Porel) renowned for his compassionate nature.

Merely the thought of his wife’s infidelity is enough to throw Tullio into an existential tailspin that has him grappling not only with the untenable prospect of her choosing to exercise the same sexual agency he affords himself, but the dreaded notion that he, a man superior, should find himself falling prey to the lowborn sensations of jealousy, envy, and rivalry. Most confounding of all (more so for Tullio than the viewer), his suspicions have the effect of rekindling his passion and reawakening his love for his wife.

But is love something Tullio is capable of?  

Tullio's high opinion of himself induces the desire to vanquish all rivals 

Luchino Visconti used the traditional family saga to chronicle the dissolution of Italian aristocracy in The Leopard (1963). With L’Innocente, the classic romantic triangle scaffolds a critique of the hypocrisy and amorality of bourgeois society while delivering a bitter requiem to Italian patriarchy (perhaps even Visconti's own). The film is set in a world rigid in its governance and regulation of women's sexuality and bodies, but Visconti's vision—one less nihilistic than D'Annunzio's morally myopic and proto-fascist source novel I was inspired to read after watching L'Innocente...twice—questions the value of a life lived in pursuit of sensual experience if starved of a spiritual existence. 

"I don't have a hell to fear or a heaven to hope for."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Given my cinematic attraction to high-style debauchery, grand passions, male nudity, and directors of whose visual style the term “operatic dimensions” is oft applied, I’ve a natural affinity for the films of Luchino Visconti. A born aesthete, Visconti’s eye finds rapturous beauty even in his stark neorealist melodramas. 

Inaccessibility and maturity of content played a part in my not seeing any of his films until college (Death in Venice being the 1st unless you count Visconti’s contribution to the 1962 anthology film Boccaccio ’70 which popped up often on late-late night TV). But my heel-dragging paid off in that I was introduced to the bulk of Visconti’s masterworks in pristine condition; when released on DVD/Blu-ray digitally enhanced, restored to their original lengths, and subtitled, not English-dubbed.

Making films that were political, sensual, and courageously Queer in subtext if not in theme, Visconti, like my other fave Ken Russell, was one of the last of the truly fearless filmmakers. The ambitious visual scope of Visconti’s films was matched only by how ambitiously his films sought to explore the dark extremes of human relationships. 

In synopsis, L’Innocente sounds like another one of those movies about men who profess to love women so much that they can’t seem to treat them like real people (making it something of a 19th-century cousin to Shampoo, Boomerang, Carnal Knowledge, and All That Jazz). Visconti takes the framework of the romantic tragedy to breathe life into the sexual double-standard narrative, making the struggle representative of larger socio-political conflicts related to morality and religion.

Luchino Visconti died on March 17, 1976 while L'Innocente was still being edited. The film didn't premiere in the U.S. until 1979. 

Didier Haudepin as Federico Hermil, Tullio's younger brother

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

“We’re intelligent, we’ve studied, we’ve traveled. We’ve enjoyed ourselves so much, we’re so rich…and then?"   Federico  L'Innocente -1976  

“We're rich, we’re famous, we’re beautiful…and miserable.” Holly  Andy Warhol’s Women in Revolt -1977

Identical sentiments, albeit from absurdly dissimilar sources. Movies tasked with depicting the empty existence of the wealthy usually fail miserably when faced with the challenge of how to visually represent a world of material excess without inadvertently glamorizing what they’re trying to condemn. My theory behind movies that fall into this trap (e.g., both the 1974 and 2013 adaptations of The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street - 2013) is that the filmmakers themselves simply don’t believe it. The movie narrative dictates it, but these directors, like many working in an industry tentpoled on glorifying its own overindulgence in greed and money-worship, come across as being too in awe (and covetous) of wealth to even recognize when their opulence gaze turns more fetishistic and admiring than critical.

Visconti, the father of Italian neorealist cinema, was born into nobility (his full title is Count Don Luchino Visconti di Modrone). Yet when his filmmaker's gaze shifted from the gritty realism of Italy’s working classes to the ornate drawing rooms of the Italian aristocracy, his vision reflected the eye of someone both familiar and disenchanted with this world. A lover of beauty, Visconti’s films are overflowing with lavishly operatic images of wealth and elegance, but his aesthetic eye for detail works in service of creating a verisimilitude that draws us into this world; a world we know only from paintings and books. The breathtaking authenticity he brings to his films via costuming (Piero Tosi), production design (Mario Garbuglia), & cinematography (Pasqualino De Santis) create environments that don't call to mind enviable splendors and worlds of happiness and comfort. Rather, they bring forth images of ornamentally lush prisons or gilded birdcages entrapping his decadent and morally-adrift characters.

Luchino Visconti's films tend to reflect periods of social, political, or ideological change. Given the director's Marxist leanings, the displays of affluence and luxury in his movies are more representative of the moral dissipation of fashionable society than an opportunity for audiences to "ooh" and "aah" at the Lifestyles of the Rich and Fascist.

PERFORMANCES

If I think back to the first time I saw L’Innocente…replaying it in my mind, trying to figure out just what in particular it is about this movie that brought me to such stinging tears by the finale,  affecting me far more deeply than any of Visconti’s arguably more masterful works; I always come back to the same thing…the eyes have it.

Visconti’s gift for vivid tableau is ideal for capturing L’Innocente’s lives of stiff formality (where bedroom-hopping, fencing, and the occasional duel seem to be the only modes of physical exertion). Amid such evocative stillness and voices not always so artfully dubbed, it’s remarkable the degree to which the film’s talented cast can convey and communicate a wealth of complex emotions solely through their eyes. That they can do so with a depth and virtuosity that is often  positively heartbreaking confirms Giancarlo Giannini’s 1975 comment to the NYT: “The eyes are the most mobile part of the body.”

Giannini’s expressive eyes were practically his calling card during the early ‘70s when his films with director Lina Wertmüller made him the darling of the foreign film scene. So it's no surprise he’s able to make the rather repugnant Tullio creepily relatable (like Daffy Duck, he’s all our worst instincts consolidated) and imbue him with a kind of pitiable humanity lacking in the novel. Laura Antonelli, whose propensity for consistently doffing her period britches made her something of an arthouse pinup during the ‘70s, is hampered somewhat by a character so compliant she risks becoming infuriating before the story reveals her truth, but Antonelli is the heart of L’Innocente and gives one of those radiant, delicate performances that gets better each time you see it.

To my utter and unending astonishment, American actress Jennifer O’Neill turned out to be my personal favorite in the entire film. Indeed, it’s O’Neill’s mournful eyes - which Visconti is wise to keep his camera trained on in the film’s heart-rending final sequence - that remains the single most haunting image my mind returns to each time I think of how much I love this movie. Known more for her beauty than her acting chops (and she looks positively stunning here), O’Neill leaves her Summer of ’42 girlishness behind in Nantucket (along with her voice, mercifully, as she is dubbed in Italian by actress Valeria Moriconi), evincing a heretofore untapped womanly bearing that's alluringly hard-edged and impassioned. 

Rina Morelli as Mrs. Hermil (mother of Tullio & Federico)
L'Innocente was the actress' last film. She also appeared in Visconti's The Leopard 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS 

Depending on the translation, Gabriele D'Annunzio's novel is known as The Innocent, The Intruder, or The Victim (US). Each title suggesting a subtle shift in the narrative interpretation of the object of Tullio’s obsession. The book is written as a first-person, past-tense confessional told from Tullio’s point of view, his warped perspective the only version of reality to which we're we're privy.  

L’Innocente’s screenplay (written by Visconti, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, & Enrico Medio) is linear in form, providing glimpses of events outside the sphere of Tullio's awareness. In essence, we're given a God’s eye view of an atheist. While the novel remains staunchly immoral and self-serving in its point of view, the religious Visconti (“My ideas may be unorthodox, but I am still a Catholic” ) who was ailing and directed from a wheelchair, has no problem coming right out and labeling his protagonist a monster.

It was poignant watching Luchino Visconti’s last film L’Innocente, during the pandemic lockdown mere months after the insurrectionist riot of January 2021. When I saw L’Innocente I was seeing a work of the artist as revolutionary—an Italian bisexual Marxist, at that—wresting the mike from the hand of history and not allowing the oppressor to control the narrative. Visconti takes an amoral chronicle written by a poet dubbed “the father of fascism” and transforms a self-aggrandizing, masturbatory exercise in nihilism into a theological, protofeminist evisceration of the kind of louche narcissist who fancies himself as a towering superman, when in reality he is simply self-loathing and morally bereft.

"I wonder why you men raise us up with one hand and drag us down with the other? Why won't you let us walk by your side, as one being next to another? A woman next to a man. Nothing more, nothing less."

Luchino Visconti’s first film was Ossessione (1943) an unauthorized adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. That film’s realism, upfront sexuality, core antifascism, and Queer sensibility flew rebelliously in the face of Mussolini’s regime and was banned.

As much as I adore it, I don’t think L’Innocente is Visconti’s best film. But in its own way, it’s a work as deceptively and sublimely subversive as his first.

BONUS MATERIAL 

Can't tell you how happy it made me feel to see the handsome star of Luchino Visconti's very first film, return, handsome as ever, 33-years later, to make an appearance in the director's swan song.

Massimo Girotti as Gino in Ossessione (1943) - Visconti's first film

Massimo  Girotti as Count Stefano in L'Innocente (1976) - Visconti's last film

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2021

THE REINCARNATION OF PETER PROUD 1975

Warning: Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review, so key plot points are revealed for the purpose of discussion.

The success of The Exorcist (1973) left Hollywood scrambling to grab up the rights to any and all novels even remotely related to the occult and the supernatural. Having exhausted the whole demonic possession thing, and with indestructible serial killers still a few years off, studios—spurred on by the burgeoning '70s New Age movement and Me-Generation interest in navel-gazing mysticism—turned to the relatively benign philosophy of reincarnation as the next hoped-for trend in cinema scares.

Employing the same, questioning, nosy-parker tact in its ad copy as The Reincarnation of Peter Proud ("Suppose you knew who you had been in a previous life. What Then?"),  1977's Audrey Rose was a classier, pedigreed big studio reincarnation release, but due to a preposterous plot, it too fared poorly at the boxoffice

With its case-history title reminiscent of 1972s The Possession of Joel Delaney, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, a popular 1973 supernatural suspense novel by TV-writer Max Ehrlich (Star Trek, The Untouchables, Suspense) was snapped up by Bing Crosby Productions (of all things) to be made into a film for release in 1975. This independent television production company (responsible for Ben Casey and Hogan’s Heroes) had recently branched out into motion pictures and enjoyed a string of sleeper successes with the low-budget thrillers Willard (1971), You’ll Like My Mother (1972), and the redneck vigilante opus Walking Tall (1973).

The Reincarnation of Peter Proud was BCPs ambitious move into the mainstream. Ehrlich was hired to adapt his book for the screenplay (misstep #1), and directing chores were handed over (promisingly) to Hollywood vet and Hitchcock fan, J. Lee Thompson. Thompson had been nominated for an Academy Award for The Guns of Navarone back in 1961, but what augured well for Peter Proud was his direction of the intense thriller Cape Fear (1962). He was also the director of the marvelously atmospheric but little-seen suspense drama Return from the Ashes in 1965. 

But alas, in order for one to consider the hiring of this 60-year-old director a boon to the making of The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, one has to conveniently overlook the TV-level mediocrity of his more recent output. Specifically, the unexceptional Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). Still, there was always the lure of the film’s talented and attractive cast; no top-tier A-listers, but a definite step-up from the unknowns and TV-Q talent usually associated with BCP films. And all at intriguingly varied stages of stardom/relevance in their respective careers.

Cast in the title role was Michael Sarrazin, whose career had stumbled a bit after the brilliant They Shoot Horses,Don’t They?  (1969), but things appeared to be on the upswing, what with landing this role after co-starring opposite Barbra Streisand in For Pete’s Sake (1974). 

Michael Sarrazin as Peter Proud

Former Cover Girl model Jennifer O’Neill, who’d made such a splash as the dream girl in 1971s The Summer ’42, was perilously close to having Hollywood invoke its unspoken three-flops-you’re-out law (Such Good Friends, The Carey Treatment, Lady Ice) when cast as the male fantasy-object in The Reincarnation of Peter Proud. Her prominent billing, despite making her entrance nearly 60 minutes into the film, a fair indication that her leading lady marquee gold hadn’t completely tarnished.

Jennifer O'Neill as Ann Curtis

Margot Kidder, still three years away from global superstardom as Lois Lane in Superman: The Movie (1978), was still something of a promising up-and-comer after her attention-getting turn in Brian DePalma’s cult hit Sisters (1973). Small but memorable turns in Black Christmas (1974) and The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) gave the uniqueness of her role in The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (coeval costars Kidder & O'Neill play mother and daughter) an emerging star-of-tomorrow feel.

Margot Kidder as Marcia Curtis

Rounding out this feminine trifecta of talent was Cornelia Sharpe, a name sure to inspire a lot of “Who?” these days, but back in the ‘70s she was the new blonde on the block; heavily touted in the press for her Faye Dunaway cheekbones (minus the acting chops), and appealing malleability in any number of underwritten “girlfriend” roles of the sort so prevalent during the male-dominated decade (most famously, Serpico-1973). Sharpe’s part in The Reincarnation of Peter Proud doesn’t really buck this trend, her presence in the largely female cast merely adding to the hopeful speculation that the R-rated suspenser was going to have a sizable overlay of ticket-selling sex and nudity with its supernatural shocks.

Cornelia Sharpe as Nora Hayes

Heterosexually speaking, if Peter Proud’s prominently publicized passel of pulchritudinous performers primed potential patrons with the prospect of a little T&A with their ESP; the film’s provocatively homoerotic poster art worked wonders for drawing the attention of the gay contingent. 

The memorable ad campaign and sole identifying graphic for the promotion of The Reincarnation of Peter Proud was this lava-lamp soaked image of muscled, heavily-striated, and (most significantly) naked actor/model Tony Stephano screaming in pain after (as we come to learn) being hit in the schnuts with a wooden boat oar. A fashion model for Givenchy seen frequently on the pages of GQ magazine at the time, Stephano makes his film debut in The Reincarnation of Peter Proud as Jeff Curtis, Peter Proud's earlier, not-so-nice incarnation.
A common promotional practice of the day was for a film with a racy theme to appear in the pages of Playboy magazine or similar skin rag as part of an advance-publicity pictorial (my eyes still burn from the sight of a naked Robert Culp in the Penthouse magazine pictorial for the forgotten 1973 haunted house flick, A Name for Evil). However, in the age of Women's Lib, Playgirl magazine, and the advent of equal-opportunity flesh-peddling, two months before the release of The Reincarnation of Peter Proud Stephano promoted the film and his chiseled assets by gracing the cover and centerfold spread of the short-lived Foxylady magazine (below, albeit sans the oar - that's just my addition in the twin interests of providing modesty and a helpful visual-aid for those who haven't seen the film).  

I’ve no idea of the production budget for The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (it has that underpopulated, TV-movie look, so my guess is minimal) but the impact its publicity machine had on me was considerable. Intriguing radio and TV spots (“Who are you Peter Proud?”); a paperback book tie-in; pervasive newspaper ads; and an R-rating which hinted at the possibility of a return to Exorcist-style shake-‘em-up explicit horror (back then I considered the recently-released PG-rated The Stepford Wives far too tame) ‒ I was stoked.

All except for two red flags:

1. It didn't bode well for the quality of The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (also known hereafter as TROPP) that it was being distributed through American International Pictures; the self-proclaimed “Woolworth’s of the movie industry” known for exploitation cheapies and bungling its rare stabs at legitimacy (Merchant/Ivory’s The Wild Party- 1975).

2. TROPP was slated to open at the movie theater where I worked. By rights, this news should have thrilled me to the core, but the theater where I was employed as an usher, The Alhambra Theater on Polk Street in San Francisco, was the sister-theater to the ritzier Regency Cinema on Van Ness. Both were first-run theaters, but the mid-town Regency got all the anticipated sure-fire hits while the Alhambra (viewed as a neighborhood theater) was given the leftovers. There was the occasional miscalculation (like when Jaws was sneak previewed there and Martin Scorsese’s sleeper hit Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore opened to consistently, wholly unexpected, sold-out business), but for the most part, if the Alhambra got it, industry buzz on the film tended to be mild.

Nora (described in the film's press material as a "sensuous grad student") attempts
to awaken Peter -as sensually as she can, I suspect- from one of his violent recurring nightmares. 

The topic of reincarnation hasn’t had a particularly good track record on film. Whether played for smarmy laughs (Goodbye Charlie -1964), set to music (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever -1970), or staged as romantic melodrama (Dead Again - 1991); reincarnation may intrigue in real-life, but in the assumed identity, anything can happen, make-believe world of film, it has credibility issues.

Peter Proud (Sarrazin), a University of California Professor of Anthropology, is plagued by vivid recurring dreams he comes to learn are actually past-life memories. In his dreams, he is inhabiting the body of another man—a man who is murdered by an unknown woman while he swims in an icy lake. Curiosity turns to obsession as Proud ventures to Springfield, Massachusetts, the city in his dreams, on a quest to discover who he was in an earlier life and to unearth the circumstances surrounding his violent death.

With the help of old newspapers and his own dream-recognition of specific locations, Proud uncovers evidence that he once existed as Jeff Cutis (Stephano), a former war hero married unhappily to banker’s daughter Marcia Buckley (Kidder). Three months after the birth of their daughter Ann, Jeff was found dead in the local lake, cause of death unknown. Only it isn’t—not for Peter Proud. He knows that Jeff was an abusive husband and serial womanizer killed by his wife that cold dark night out on the lake 35 years ago.

Getting To Know You

Intrigued by the thought of meeting both the wife and daughter of his former self, Proud rather recklessly insinuates himself into the lives of the now-grown Ann (O'Neill)--a sweet-natured divorcee with sad eyes--and 60-year-old widow Marica, the pretty, smiling brunette in his dreams who's matured into something of a morose, guilt-ridden sot.

Before long, Proud’s fevered obsession with his past life is supplanted by a desire to build a future of his own as he finds himself falling in love with Ann, who is, metaphysically speaking, his daughter. Meanwhile, Proud’s subconscious similarities to her late husband arouse mounting suspicions (and a few other things) in Marcia, leading to a violent reenactment of a past tragedy that was perhaps always fated to be.

With its not-uninteresting premise, combining elements of the psychological suspense film with the supernatural thriller and crime/detective mystery; The Reincarnation of Peter Proud had the potential to mine some of the same dreamy, eerily perverse terrain of erotic fixation as Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) or Brian De Palma’s 1977 Obsession. Unfortunately, Ehrlich’s plot-driven, exposition-heavy script and Thompson’s lacking-in-nuance, indifferent direction give TROPP the feel of a dramatically compelling TV Movie of the Week. With lots of nudity.

What Did I Have That I Don't Have?

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM 
In a film as promising, but ultimately lacking, as The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, it’s difficult to pinpoint just where, among so many gross miscalculations, things went most wrong. But for me, problems with the script seemed evident from the film’s first frames. Max Ehrlich (often taking sizable chunks of dialog from his novel) shows no flair for the rhythms and tones of natural conversation. Revealing his TV-based roots, nearly every word spoken is designed either to propel the plot forward or provide expository information.

Character development (helpful in getting audiences invested in the emotional stakes behind Proud’s obsessive quest) takes a backseat to the writer’s efforts to propel the story forward along its inexorable path. The result is what often befalls rote disaster films and poorly-made horror movies: the characters’ actions and motivations are solely in service of plot machinations and rarely seem to emanate from personality or normal human behavior patterns.

After driving throughout Massachusetts in search of the unknown city he sees in his dreams,
Peter finally comes upon a recognizable landmark

For example: sure, the whole reincarnation angle of the plot is known to the audience before the film even begins, but Ehrlich's overdetermined script never allows the characters to consider any other explanations for Peter's strange behavior (like demonic possession or schizophrenia, for example). Once it's suggested that reincarnation is behind Proud speaking in another man’s voice, suffering phantom pain attacks, and being plagued by detailed visions of a life imagined or remembered, the abrupt and unquestioning acceptance of that theory by everyone turns what could have been a mysterious journey of discovery into a protracted lecture on New Age mysticism. In short, a more creative adapter of the material might have strived to make the film's title potentially ambiguous, with Peter Proud a perhaps unreliable narrator misleading the viewer (something Roman Polanski did beautifully with the literal-minded novel that became his ambiguous screen adaptation of Rosemary's Baby).

The premise of The Reincarnation of Peter Proud is already fairly fascinating fodder for a suspense thriller, I just wish someone had thought it worth the effort to supplement the story with more fleshed-out characterizations.

In the novel, the whole metaphysical incest angle is skirted by having Peter remain chastely in love with Ann. The film controversially has Peter and Ann consummate their love in a sequence intercut with shots of Ann's mother and father (uh...Peter, sort of) making love on the same spot 35 years hence.

PERFORMANCES

Which brings up the film's other problem. In spite of what I might have hoped for in the way of mainstream seriousness from the ads and advance publicity, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud is an exploitation movie, and as such, the sensational aspects of the plot are the film’s real stars.

Still, that doesn’t excuse what passes for acting by a large portion of the film’s cast. Michael Sarrazin, always a rather likable but vague screen presence (which is perhaps why the amorphous Robert of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? remained the most memorable work of his career) fails to capture any of the dark nuances of a character fixated on knowing his former self, yet willing to have sex with the daughter of the man he knows he once was.

The appealing Jennifer O’Neill is mostly cast and used for her beauty and blank-slate personality (she’s like Mary-Ann on Gilligan’s Island; the perfect, non-threatening, girlfriend male fantasy).

Mother and Child Reunion

Margot Kidder, in what might be called a double role (although her 1940’s persona is sliced and diced to snippets) gives the film’s best performance. Although never once physically convincing as a 60-year-old woman (makeup is a little too junior college theater dept.), Kidder emotionally inhabits her character in a way that renders realistic the toll taken on a broken woman weary from carrying around a burdensome secret for too many years. Her scenes with same-age O'Neill (both 26) are particularly interesting to watch.

Debralee Scott as Suzy
Scott's bit role as a helpful teen (almost all of her dialogue is exposition) cements the film in the 1970s. Debralee Scott seemed to be all over the place during the decade, memorable as Louise Lasser's sister in TVs Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Donna Pescow's sister on Angie, and as a regular on Welcome Back, Kotter. Scott passed away in 2005, but these days she's highly visible on the Buzzr network on several game shows. Should it ever show up on YouTube, I recommend you catch her in the 1973 TV movie A Summer Without Boys.

Worst performance is an overcrowded category finds the lovely but tone-deaf Cornelia Sharpe (she sounds as though she learned her dialog phonetically) outpacing both pipe-smoking parapsychologist Paul Hecht (saying his lines and hitting his marks without projecting much through that forest of hair on his face), and the ever-nude Tony Stephano, whose Arrow Collar Man profile is perfect for the era, but whose voice I suspect is dubbed.

If you didn't grow up in the hair-helmet '70s, you're forgiven for assuming actor Paul Hecht
 (as parapsychologist/sleep-researcher Samuel Goodman)
 is wearing one of these contemporary crochet bearded-beanies 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
The Reincarnation of Peter Proud sought to distinguish itself in the horror/supernatural movie market by being explicit, but not in the head-spinning, vomit-spewing way. TROPP promoted itself as an erotic thriller, and its many controversial scenes were geared for maximum shock effect.

Marcia masturbates recalling the sexual assault she suffered at the hands of her late husband

A tiresome '70s trope (Peckinpah's Straw Dogs) was the rape that morphs into sex

Reflecting perhaps the film's lack of a cohesive point of view, Peter's metaphysically incestual relationship with Ann is depicted in romantic terms. If Peter does indeed believe he's the reincarnation of Ann's father, his taking the relationship to a physical level comes off as irresponsible at best, amoral at worst.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The Reincarnation of Peter Proud is one of those curious movies from my past where, after the initial disappointment of unrealized potential has settled (taking years to do so), nostalgia turns flaws into assets, and the film’s ability to perfectly evoke a particular time and place overrides its general weakness.

I can’t fully separate my reaction to The Reincarnation of Peter Proud from my nostalgic memories of my life in 1975. Nor do I want to. TROPP is, in my eyes, a film not wholly successful as either an erotic thriller or supernatural suspenser; yet it can't be denied that the film still manages to strike a chord with those who were of a certain age when they saw it (adolescent to late teens). The film obviously works on some level for me, perhaps one better suited to a Night Gallery or Twilight Zone episode, but its minor effectiveness can't be denied..
There’s plenty of ‘70s weirdness about it, which I like, but it suffers because it lacks the kind of crazy you find in the dark corners of the works of Hitchcock, Polanski, and other directors with demons they use film to exorcize. And a movie as offbeat as this NEEDS that kind of crazy.

One of the film's more eerily effective scenes is when Peter accompanies Ann to the convalescent home to visit her paternal grandmother. The woman, who hasn't spoken or acknowledged another person for years, suddenly sees Peter and recognizes her son, Jeffrey.

The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, with its pedestrian direction and bland cinematography (surprising given that its cinematographer is Victor J. Kemper, the man who shot Xanadu and the stylish Eyes of Laura Mars) flattens out what really is a pretty loopy yarn that could have been an eerily sexy, metaphysical mind-bender. It’s not the film it could have been, but when I look at it now, I find myself increasingly grateful to it for being what it is.

Everything about its look just screams 1975 (the fashions, color scheme, washed-out appearance), as does its sober approach to the material (the dead-serious attitude about reincarnation is naively preachy), and the slightly-off feeling of the performances (on par with what you’d see on '70s TV or in big-screen genre films like Earthquake).

So I look at The Reincarnation of Peter Proud and marvel at the many things mainstream movies wouldn’t think of trying to get away with today. I poke fun at the risible dialog and plot contrivances, the poky acting, and the dated milieu. But I also allow myself to be taken back to my youth by the abstract, almost metaphysical notion that the enjoyment derived from certain movies is often untethered to the particulars of said film’s quality, but rather, wholly connected to the nostalgic pleasure to be found in (safely) revisiting one's past.

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2016