Taglines: Somewhere in this world there is one person you destined to meet.
Another Man, Another Chance movie storyline. A photographer, who has been hired to photograph the wild west of America where he has lived his entire life, tells his client of a photograph he has that was taken one hundred years ago by his French great-grandmother that epitomizes what he is trying to capture. The story behind the photographer’s heritage and that photograph…
In the early 1870s, photographer Francis Leroy and who would eventually becomes his wife, Jeanne Leroy née Perriere, a baker’s daughter and an aspiring photographer in her own right, move from Paris, where strife has taken hold due to Napoleon’s loss in the Franco-Prussian War, to the American west, where the light is more conducive for their photography work. The move is despite not knowing about life at their destination and not knowing how to speak English.
Veterinarian David Williams and his wife Mary Williams love each other, but their wants in life are incompatible with each other, David who loves his work treating real animals on farms and ranches, while Mary would rather live in Philadelphia where she was raised, especially as she feels isolated more often than not being alone on their remote farm.
Several years later after both Francis and Mary are tragically killed in separate incidents, Jeanne and David meet for the first time as they both drop their respective children off at the same boarding school run by its unconventional teacher, Alice. Despite Jeanne and David’s attraction to each other, a second chance at love for both may be impeded by the memories of their respective first spouse, for David especially as Mary’s murderers were never caught.
Another Man, Another Chance (Un Autre Homme, Une Autre Chance, UK title: Another Man, Another Woman) is a 1977 French western film directed by Claude Lelouch and starring James Caan, Geneviève Bujold, Francis Huster, Susan Tyrrell, Jennifer Warren, Rossie Harris, Linda Lee Lyons, Diana Douglas, Michael Berryman, Jacques Villeret and Fred Stuthman. The film was released on September 28, 1977 in France.
Film Review for Another Man, Another Chance
She (Genevieve Bujold) is a French baker’s daughter who leaves her battered homeland at the end of the Franco-Prussian war and travels by sea to America, where she and her husband, a photographer, board a wagon train and head for the Old West. En route, a Polish woman prophesies that she will be widowed and never see France again. Both things turn out to be true.And he (James Caan), he is a veterinarian.
One day, he returns home and, after greeting his dogs and cattle, discovers that his pretty young wife has been raped and murdered. He is heart-broken for a few years, but gradually he begins to recover. This is most fortunate, since he and she are by now living in the same frontier town, and fate is ready to throw them together.
At the very end of Claude Lelouch’s “Another Man, Another Chance,” they fall in love.The plot sounds like vintage James Michener, give or take a couple of generations, and indeed it has the makings of a good yarn. However, Mr. Lelouch proves to be less interested in telling his story than in tippy-toeing around its edges. There is abundant cross-cutting, between images as disparate as the veterinarian’s giving a local schoolteacher a friendly squeeze and a breadline in wartime France.There are filters so yellowy that the sky turns green.
Most maddeningly of all, there is incessant hand-held camerawork in sequences that don’t warrant it: One of Mr. Lelouch’s favorite tricks is to track the camera for a while, hold it only half-still as a conversation takes place, and then track some more. The viewer is likely to feel seasick long before Miss Bujold makes her ocean voyage.It would be unfair to accuse Mr. Lelouch of pretentiousness, since more often than not one is bound to be uncertain about just what he is pretending to do.
The opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for instance, punctuate many scenes for no apparent reason. “If I can’t joke about death, what can I joke about?” asks one rather bewildering character. And the film begins with a modern-day sequence in which Mr. Caan, playing one of his own descendants, is hired to photograph an ad man’s vision of what the Old West must have been like.This involves a Cadillac, four horses and several women in pioneer garb, and Mr. Caan complains that it’s silly. More to the point, the whole sequence is silly, especially since neither the photographer nor the present is referred to again.
By the second half of the film, though, Mr. Lelouch has either cleaned up his act or lost his power to annoy. The story begins to take flight when Miss Bujold and Mr. Caan finally meet, and the rest of it is told in a reasonably straightforward manner.The performances are helpful even when Mr. Lelouch is not. The film is so poorly and inconsistently dubbed into English that the actors often seem to be shouting from across a large, empty room, but Miss Bujold nevertheless creates a feeling of intimacy.
Her peculiarly childlike prettiness becomes ever more interesting as time gives her an incongruously haggard look.Mr. Caan has had few roles that show him off to proper advantage, accentuating his playfulness and physicality. Here, he struts about manfully and says things like “Over my dead body—you got it?” But he also radiates an easy charm, and his ruggedness helps keep Mr. Lelouch’s sepia-toned tableaux from turning to utter mush.Jennifer Warren and Francis Huster are quite memorable as the ill-fated first spouses; so is Susan Tyrrell, in a less successful way.
Miss Tyrrell is Mr. Lelouch’s rather bizarre choice for the role of the good-natured schoolmarm with whom Miss Bujold leaves her daughter and Mr. Caan his son. Even in her most innocuous moods, Miss Tyrrell never quite seems like the sort of person with whom one ought to park small children.”Another Man, Another Chance” is rated PG (“Parental Guidance Suggested”). It contains a nasty rape scene, though not a graphic one, and another sequence that makes childbearing look like the scariest thing in the world.
Another Man, Another Chance (1977)
Directed by: Claude Lelouch
Starring: James Caan, Geneviève Bujold, Francis Huster, Susan Tyrrell, Jennifer Warren, Rossie Harris, Linda Lee Lyons, Diana Douglas, Michael Berryman, Jacques Villeret, Fred Stuthman
Screenplay by: Claude Lelouch
Production Design by: Robert Clatworthy, Raymond Leplont
Cinematography by: Stanley Cortez, Jacques Lefrancois
Film Editing by: Georges Klotz, Fabien D. Tordjmann
Costume Design by: Jean Pezet
Set Decoration by: Frank R. McKelvy
Art Direction by: Eric Moulard
Music by: Francis Lai
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: United Artists
Release Date: September 28, 1977 (France)
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