1969-12-09
N/A
90 min
Professor Samuel Hale Constable is a government expert in the field of cybernetics. He and his wheelchair-bound wife Lenore became parents late in life, only to lose their daughter Mary before she reached adolescence. Now their daughter's spirit seems to be reaching out to her grief-stricken father from beyond the grave, encouraging him to give up the important project on which he's been working.
At times, this is quite a decent supernatural drama with Ray Milland ("Prof. Constable") as a man haunted by the recent death of his young daughter. When driving home from the cemetery one night, he is certain that he has seen her, heard her - almost touched her! He decides that either this is a real psychic phenomenon or he is being had, so consults cybernetics man "Lauder" (Don Murray) to get to the bottom of it. FBI man Ed Asner ("Wiener") also has an interest in the case as it transpires that "Constable" is, unwittingly, working for the government on some top secret project and it soon looks like there is a third hand at work here and manipulation on a grand scale is afoot. The use of the visual effects and audio is quite effective in recreating a plausible scenario of re-incarnation but the score from Robert Drasnin overwhelms any subtlety and even Milland's acting is a bit too by the book. There is little by way of menace and as the political storyline develops, it really stops being very interesting. Still, worth watching for the first half hour.
