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Review of The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (Jerry Goldsmith)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you trust Jerry Goldsmith to provide intelligent
instrumental and thematic design to cues for murder, masturbation,
incest, and fornication.
Avoid it... if you expect to find any truly satisfying album presentation for this challenging hybrid score, its poor sound quality long inhibiting its appeal.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
The Reincarnation of Peter Proud: (Jerry Goldsmith)
Is it incest? Who cares?! If the 1975 movie The Reincarnation of
Peter Proud teaches you one thing about your next life, it's this:
When your wife kills you and you get reincarnated as a different man,
don't go back and have sex with your own daughter thirty years later.
Your ex-wife may just become enraged all over again and kill you a
second time. As shocking as that premise may be, it would seem that this
particular movie sought to make you feel bad about the death of one
Peter Proud, but in fairness to the poor dude, he was suffering from
terrible visions of his past life and couldn't help but investigate the
people and places he was seeing in his dreams. He travels across America
to pursue answers and confirms that he is indeed, for whatever reason,
the reincarnation of some asshole who was so demeaning to his wife that
she pounded the shit out his head in the middle of a lake. What's creepy
about The Reincarnation of Peter Proud is the psychosis of the
scorned woman, her mind sufficiently crazed by the events of her past to
engage in the movie's most memorable scene: Margot Kidder masturbating
in a bathtub while recalling her dead husband raping her long ago.
Compared to that, the father-daughter action is merely a slightly
disturbing sideshow. The movie was the kind of supernatural and
psychological thriller typical to the middle of the 1970's, and stuff
like that had the peril of alienating audiences in the theatre while
being wholly unsuitable for television showings. Such was the dismal
path to obscurity for The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, though
artsy filmmakers have planned unsuccessfully to remake the movie for
years. A common workhorse in this genre of the 1970's was composer Jerry
Goldsmith, who took this assignment as the culmination of his genre
efforts that included The Illustrated Man, The Other, and
The Mephisto Waltz in a short period of time. These projects
encouraged the composer to engage in a journey of experimentation that
yielded a heavy synthesizer presence in The Reincarnation of Peter
Proud and served as a practice run for the sounds of Logan's
Run the next year.
Goldsmith's use of electronics in The Reincarnation of Peter Proud is highly targeted to represent the supernatural weirdness of the whole story. Their placement in the mix and their tone are the most intense in the dream sequences and diminish as Peter Proud's previous life becomes his reality, eliminating his own visions. The synthetics ultimately boomerang at the end of the movie for the second killing scene, however, making one wonder if they are not somehow connected to the menace of the troubled wife. Goldsmith personally experimented with and performed these lines at home prior to adding them to the orchestral layers. The Moog synthesizers of the era were limited by standards set just a few years later, but they were already sophisticated enough for the composer to generate some truly inventive sounds for this work and Logan's Run. On the flip side, he utilizes a small but effective orchestra for the shifting relationships and Proud's peace with the past. Goldsmith explicitly adds instrumental layers to his ensemble as the story progresses, even going so far as to replace muted brass with open brass towards the end. Piano and flute are the core of the work, the former for suspense and latter for fleeting love. The chamber-sized string ensemble is suitable for intimacy but can generate some depth of drama when needed, highlighted during disturbing orgasm scene. (Don't expect the ambient power to match that of Basic Instinct, but the thought process and general execution is much the same.) An acoustic guitar attempts to supply some contemporary comfort once the synthetics start to wane in their role. Specialty instruments include a variety of unusual percussion and seemingly a sitar, though the poor recording quality masks the origins of some of Goldsmith's more unusual sounds. The headlining flute uses different performance techniques and the composer's beloved echoplexing technique to reflect the reincarnation effect. All of these pieces are assembled to convey significant thematic development at almost every moment in the work, but not all of it is accessible. In fact, most of the score is pretty unpleasant by design, but even in the hopeful, albeit somewhat uncomfortable searching sequences in the middle and the love story near the end, Goldsmith doesn't shy away from reminding you of this film's demented personality. Thematically, the score for The Reincarnation of Peter Proud can be divided into three equal acts, with one theme dominating each of the three sections. Although these ideas sometimes cross over into the other portions of the narrative, they largely flourish in their proper succession. Goldsmith's main theme is a very long-lined identity primarily for flute, its figures cyclical and unresolved for the reincarnation concept. It's adapted all over the score, using both the orchestral and synthetic tones, and it's heard immediately on flute at the outset of "Main Title" before shifting to synths for suspense. The main theme is badly distorted in "Old Lovers" but reforms in "Classic Cars" and is then slowed dramatically on synths in "Short Changed" and "No Dreams." Urgently performed by piano at the start of "Occult Academy," this theme struggles to retain its shape by the troubled "Enough Suffering" and becomes displaced by other ideas as the main character loses his Proud identity, barely alive by the first half of "The Church Pt. 1." But it whimsically returns on deceptive strings in "Home at Last" and has fleeting influences in the "More Discoveries" cues aside from a nice flute rendition in "More Discoveries Pt. B." It is almost completely supplanted by the love theme in the third act, combining with that theme wonderfully for the full ensemble performance in "The Lovers." The theme's character representations are muddied by its emergence again in sensual string layers during the masturbation scene in "Fantasy Pt. 2." For the film's conclusion, though, the idea reprises its opening flute and piano demeanor at the end of "Final Confrontation." The second theme of significance in The Reincarnation of Peter Proud is Goldsmith's searching motif representing Proud's investigation into his prior life. This theme contains a cyclical ascending and descending rhythmic formation underneath descending melodic lines, and there's an obsessive quality to its domination of the score's second act. Heard first on synthesizers at 0:42 into "Main Title," it vaguely guides the chords of the synthetic "After Thoughts" but turns organically optimistic at 0:13 into "The Search Begins" on plucked strings and unusual metallic tones, the underlying rhythm carried by acoustic guitar as a warmer presence for the melodic line on top. It guides the first half of "The Search Continues" with synths carrying the melody, interrupts the main theme in the middle of "The Church Pt. 1" and "Home at Last," becomes more forceful in "The Statue," and influences the "More Discoveries" cues. For Goldsmith collectors more interested in the composer's lyrical identities of the era, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud does offer a fairly engrossing love theme that is only present in the score's third act. Its construct is a clever extension of the descending searching motif, likely an intentionally incestuous choice by Goldsmith, and the idea's secondary lines remind of his typical character themes of the 1990's. This pretty but elusive theme builds momentum and warmth orchestrally throughout "Ann & Tennis," turns tense late in "How Did It Happen?," and is slowed for more intimacy from keyboards, strings, and flute in "First Date." Its acoustic attraction is interrupted by synthetic suspense in the middle of "The Picnic" and reduced to quiet piano at the outset of "Where Have You Been?" Although it's a bit timid at the start of "The Cottage" on flute, the love theme enjoys its full romantic mode for piano and strings in the pretty "The Lovers." Two lesser motifs round out the score, neither particularly weighty but appreciable for those in tune with Goldsmith's finer strategies. An identity motif consists of a rising figure without an answer and can be expressed very briefly, previewed playfully on low flute in "Occult Academy" and continuing on flutes at the end of "Who Am I?" and opening of "Crystal Lake." This motif is littered in short allusions throughout several later cues, worried in several renditions during "Search for Mom," taking the forefront in "Who Are You?," and underpinning the main theme's dramatic flailing at the climax of "Final Confrontation." Finally, a rage motif for the killer wife is, not surprisingly, a stabbing motion heard in eerie tones at 1:26 into "Main Title" on twisted woodwinds and synthesizers but earning its violence when it returns with a straight horror burst at 1:34 into "Fantasy Pt. 1" and opens "Final Confrontation" on muscular piano pounding. Overall, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud can be a challenging score, and its listening experience is frustrated by poor sound quality that negates some of the remarkable creativity in the instrumentation. The music was long bootlegged from awful mono sources, but Intrada Records finally accomplished its best effort in providing a better presentation officially in 2018. Unfortunately, though they secured even better mono sources, Intrada could only obtain stereo mixes for the first half of the score. For their album, they provide some faux-stereo techniques to the second half, but that leaves many of the most impressive cues in essentially mono sound. Casual listeners may want to wait in the hopes that better sources can be located for these more engaging murder, masturbation, incest, and fornication cues. ***
TRACK LISTINGS:
1996 Soundtrack Library Bootleg:
Total Time: 61:27
2018 Intrada Album: Total Time: 63:58
NOTES & QUOTES:
There exists no official packaging for the 1996 Soundtrack Library bootleg.
The insert of the 2018 Intrada album includes extensive information about the film
and score.
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