I've Lived Before (1956)

Sadly Over-hyped

Powerful

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

It's not a good film, but it's an interesting subject. How they treat it could be discussed indeed, and it's not very well. The story is this. A passenger airplane pilot sees an elderly lady as a passenger he has never seen before but recognizes her and gets confused for not being able to place her. In the confusion in charge of the plane he suddenly becomes another person and almost crashes the plane. When he wakes up at the hospital he still believes he is a crashed war pilot of world war one. Of course, this creates a problem, especially since he doesn't even recognize the girl he is going to marry. The whole rest of the film is only discussions, so it gets monotonous, but Ann Harding as the elderly lady makes a fascinating performance - she commands every scene she appears in, and it's actually her case the whole story is about. It becomes something like a metaphysical detective story. The doctor's explanation of the phenomenon is that it's all about telepathy. All doubters are of course, like always, eventually proved stupid and wrong.Phenomena like these occur, there are always doubters and deniers trying to explain them away, the insistent maniac who is too aware of the truth to be able to compromise with it is always proved right, sometimes not without martyrdom, but here the most important issue is left unanswered. Will the pilot ever again be admitted to fly? Many questions are discussed at length and answered, but this only important one is carelessly and irrationally neglected.

This film was released during the short-lived "Bridey Murphy" reincarnation craze of the mid-1950s. As such, I expected it to be somewhat exploitative, but it actually turned out to be a serious, well-intentioned study of reincarnation that presented alternate viewpoints, explored psychological explanations, and told the story of someone whose reincarnation story appears to be true. Jock Mahoney, usually associated with western and jungle films, does a fine job as a pilot who has strange, unexpected flashes of memories and unexplained knowledge from the life of a World War I pilot who died in 1918. My teenaged daughter, who was working on the computer in the same room where I was watching this film, stopped her work a few minutes into the film, and soon after came over to the couch and watched the rest of the film, riveted. I should state that this is a low-budget B-movie and contains a lot of talky sequences and serious-minded soliloquies--the kind of things that are not too popular with today's jaded, ironic screenwriters-- but those who would enjoy a serious (although in some ways naive) examination of reincarnation on a b-movie level should find this film worth seeking out.

It's easy to criticize this entry in 1950s' very brief and now forgotten "reincarnation" cycle. Most of the scenes simply consist of two or three people sitting around in standard studio-interior sets laying out the plot in straightforward expository dialog. These scenes progress with unimaginative efficiency from one plot-point to the next. The acting and the technical aspects of the production are never more than B-movie competent, and the flat ending is no more than John McIntyre delivering the kind of tie-up-the-loose-ends sort of speech which screenwriters are supposed to avoid.And yet ... something about "I've Lived Before" merits a certain grudging admiration. Perhaps it's that unvarnished, minimalist quality which both limits and distinguishes it. In any case, those with a taste for the slightly off-beat may find this worth a look.The opening two sequences, one set in 1918 France and one set in upstate New York in 1931 are unnecessary and get the movie off on the wrong foot, and there are the usual quirks which are now dated and provoke unwanted laughter such as the co-pilot smoking in the cockpit, the boyfriend sleeping on his fiancee's couch while she chastely retires to the bedroom, and Federal Airways optimistically billing itself as "The World's Safest Airline."On the other hand, this provides a good showcase for Jock Mahoney, one of those beautiful men who doesn't seem to realize how beautiful he really is. It's both puzzling and unfortunate that he never became a star. Sadly, by the time he played the lead in two Tarzan movies, he was a bit past his prime as was the whole Tarzan genre. In this movie, he has only two fleeting bare-chest scenes contained inside a brief montage of medical examinations.Fans of movies from the '30s and '40s will be pleased to see Ann Harding in a good supporting role, and the stewardess on the airplane is played by April Kent who later appeared as the female midget in "The Incredible Shrinking Man."

A year or two before this film was released, the biggest best seller in the US was a book called "The Search for Bridey Murphy," a book about reincarnation. In that book a modern woman supposedly knew intimate details of the life of Bridey Murphy, an obscure Irish woman who died in the 19th century and of whom she had never heard. This silly film, in which a contemporary (1956) man remembers details in the life of a WWI pilot who was killed in action, was obvious intended to capitalize on "Bridey Murphy"'s success. It's not a good movie.There is one reason, and only one, to see this film, and that is to see the gorgeous Leigh Snowden. She made very few film and retired from acting before she was 30, after she, truly a woman of the 50s, married accordianist Dick Contino and dedicated herself to raising a family. If her career had been better managed, or if she had been more committed to acting, she might have rivaled some of the blonde sex symbols of the 50s, such as Monroe and Mansfield. But it was not to be. Since this film isn't on video, the only chance you'll have to see it is if you're lucky enough to catch it on cable, most likely during the wee hours. Otherwise, your best opportunity to see the Lovely Leigh is in "All That Heaven Allows," an excellent Douglas Sirk soaper. Leigh, alas, will never be seen again; she died of cancer in 1982.