L'uomo che visse due volte

This shouldn't be very good. It's a B movie about a pilot who suspects he's reincarnated. It feels like an extended episode of One Step Beyond. The whole movie is just people talking. The only action is the opening plane scenes and one of those is almost certainly footage from another film. Still, I found myself glued to the screen from beginning to end. It probably could have been 10 minutes shorter but, besides that, I don't really have any complaints.

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.

... here at age 53, has quite a bit to do with how well this film works.

First scene, there is a WWI dogfight going on, and an allied plane crashes and burns. Next scene, it is a 1931 air show, and some twelve year old kid is flying around in one of the old WWI planes. The people on the ground are justifiably panicked. But the kid lands the plane like a pro. When questioned about it, the kid says he just seemed to know how to fly and land the plane. Jump to present day and that kid who has grown up to be pilot John Bolan (Jock Mahoney) is boarding his plane. He and the copilot indulge in small talk about John's upcoming marriage. But then John sees a passenger (Ann Harding as Jane Stone). He asks her if they know each other or if she has ever flown this airline before. She says no to both, in fact it is the first time she has flown. John goes back to the cockpit, somewhat in a daze. Then he starts to drive the plane into the ground, talking about the flames and how he's been shot. The copilot has to knock the pilot out to get him to relinquish control so that he can guide the plane to safety.

On the ground, and in the hospital, John Bolan thinks that he is WWI pilot Peter Stephens, killed in a dogfight in 1918. He does come to his senses eventually, but still has memories of the dead WWI pilot and feels he is the reincarnation of this man. He doesn't want to spend his life being haunted by this man he never knew, and believes that passenger Jane Stone is the key to what is going on, since seeing her and seeming to recognize her is what brought on his "attack" in the cockpit.

This film was an unexpected delight for me. I had never heard of it, and it looks spartanly done as though it were a poverty row film by that era, although it was made by Universal. It has no big names in the cast except for Ms. Harding, whose heyday was really the 1930s. John McIntyre, one of the great character actors, has a larger part than I am accustomed to seeing him in as John's sympathetic doctor after his breakdown, the fatherly voice of reason.

Several surprises in this film. First, nobody thinks John is a fraud. They all think him a good man in search of solutions. At worst obsessed, but not a liar. Second, there are no firm conclusions. In the end, the doctor says that man is only beginning to understand the mind, and there could be any number of explanations as to what has transpired. Third, Ann Harding commands your attention as much at age 53 as she did at age 28. She is truly timeless. Finally, John, after having what appears as a psychotic break and almost crashing one of their airplanes with 28 passengers aboard, is assured by his boss that all of his medical bills will be taken care of! Fat chance of that happening today. And the boss that assures him of this is played by Raymond Bailey, who ironically played skinflint banker Milburn Drysdale on the long running TV show The Beverly Hillbillies .

This is really worth seeking out.

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.

I have read most of the other reviews and I have almost nothing to say about the subject of this excellent film on a meagre budget which is reincarnation. The ' almost nothing ' is that I do not know and posit the fact that no one knows, and respect those who are against being reborn and those who don't. But what I do believe is that despite Universal Studios giving two of its ' minor ' actors to play the lead roles that they both give extraordinarily good performances. Jock Mahoney as the pilot who thinks he has been reincarnated is utterly convincing, and the horror and dismay he feels at the beginning of this realisation made me feel that he was far better as an actor than the celebrated Rock Hudson. The same goes for Leigh Snowden, who could have equalled Marilyn Monroe, shows an intelligence and sensitivity in her support for her husband to be, and the nightmarish ( literally ) situation he is in. Why Hollywood did not realise that they had physically beautiful, talented actors who could have played in ' A ' films as well as ' B ' films is beyond understanding. My I don't know about this is much larger than that of reincarnation, and I am saddened to see that both Mahoney and Snowden were so ill used. And then there is Ann Harding, a superb actor who was understood as such and the presence of all three of them at the close of the film brought tears to my eyes. A scene that any budding actor should be able to see, and yet this film has as far as I know been dumped on the bonfire of unwanted films for far too long. There is also a lot of communication in the scenario, and serious discussion which is so lacking in many a Hollywood film of this current verbally poverty stricken era. The direction is capable, the sets minimal but for anyone who loves actor's cinema it is a must see. YouTube has it in a weathered copy, and I for sure will watch it again. I give it a 9 instead of 10 because it should not have been given ' B ' film treatment, and have perhaps been respected more.