The Search for Bridey Murphy is a 1956 American drama film written and directed by Noel Langley and starring Teresa Wright, Louis Hayward, and Nancy Gates. Based on the best-selling book by Morey Bernstein, the film tells the story of contemporary American woman Virginia Tighe (renamed Ruth Simmons in the film) who, while under Bernstein's hypnosis, reveals herself to have been Bridey Murphy, a 19th-century Irishwoman in a past life. The phenomenon experienced by Tighe was later explained as a case of cryptomnesia.
Released by Paramount Pictures in October 1956, The Search for Bridey Murphy was the only Hollywood film to be directed by Langley, who was better known as a screenwriter. It was part of a wave of films about reincarnation and hypnotism, which also included I've Lived Before (1956), The She-Creature (1956), and The Undead (1957).
Geoffrey O'Brien called The Search for Bridey Murphy a "glum and threadbare production" that flopped at the box office. The film also suffered commercially from an increased public skepticism that "highly impressionable subjects were so eager to please their hypnotists", the subjects would "ransack their unconscious minds for stray childhood memories and reassemble them into a more or less convincing former life."
Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)
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