Dedications: My four late friends Rory, Stan, Bryan, Jeff - shine on you crazy diamonds, they would have blogged too. Then theres Garry from Brisbane, Franco in Milan, Mike now in S.F. / my '60s-'80s gang: Ned & Joseph in Ireland; in England: Frank, Des, Guy, Clive, Joe & Joe, Ian, Ivan, Nick, David, Les, Stewart, the 3 Michaels / Catriona, Sally, Monica, Jean, Ella, Anne, Candie / and now: Daryl in N.Y., Jerry, John, Colin, Martin and Donal.

Sunday 27 November 2016

Un Autre Homme, Une Autre Chance, 1977

Time for another look at Claude Leouch's 1977 western: This is my original review in 2010:

ANOTHER MAN ANOTHER CHANCE - Not really French, this long unseen rarity is a pleasure to see it again now. It is of course a western reworking by Claude Lelouch of his 1966 mega-hit UN HOMME ET UNE FEMME - as this is another man and another woman in a different time and place. Its a handsome pleasant hazy re-creation of the old west (well apart from the rape and murder of vet James Caan's wife, Jennifer Warren...). It begins in revolutionary Paris as photographer Francis Huster and wife Genevieve Bujold decide to move to the new world and travel by ship to America, then they are on a covered wagon and attacked by redskins and finally decide to settle and open their photography business. Caan also arrives in town, having sold his ranch, and deposits his baby with the underwritten part of the school-teacher - a too-little seen Susan Tyrell. Then cue the influences of Lelouch's original: some years later they visit their children at the school, she misses her stagecoach drive home, the teacher asks him to give her a drive, they slowly open up to each other, he asks to meet her husband and then we get the flashback about how he was killed .... instead of motor cars and racing tracks there are stagecoaches and horse races - and the ending is perfect as he rides on horseback to join her and the children [having brought his wife's killers to justice] as the camera pulls back to leave them as figures in a landscape with a neat voiceover as it fades to a sepia photograph in a photo-album. It turns out it is the story about the grandmother of the man we see at the start ... 
If you loved the '66 original, you will get a lot of pleasure out of this too, particularly with Caan and Bujold at their most pleasing, both are very likeable here, and as charistmatic as Trintignant and Aimee in the 1966 film,. Lelouch though seems to be out of fashion now, unlike Demy, Malle, Truffaut or Chabrol... We love Bujold of course in films like De Palma's OBSESSION or the ace thriller COMA

2 comments:

  1. Another one I missed and which you have made me want to see. I will keep an eye out for it.

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