Another Man, Another Chance

The American West as seen through the eyes of a French filmmaker provides a curious and offbeat approach to the genre in Another Man, Another Chance (1977), directed by Claude Lelouch, whose most famous film remains his breakout 1966 art house hit, A Man and a Woman; it also won the Oscar® for Best Foreign Language Film. Unlike most Hollywood produced Westerns, Another Man, Another Chance relies less on the traditional attributes of the form and presents instead a slow burn love story shaped by the turbulent events of the 1870s in both Europe and the U.S. Similar to the narrative structure of A Man and a Woman and other Lelouch films such as And Now My Love (1974) in which fate brings together two people over the passage of time, the movie provides parallel narratives in which the story's two main protagonists eventually emerge and find each other. Another Man, Another Chance opens in the present as a commercial photographer (James Caan) attempts to shoot a car ad on the great plains while trying to convince his producer to take a more authentic approach based on his grandmother's photographs of the West. In the dual flashback stories that follow Caan plays his own grandfather, David Williams, a frontier veterinarian with a wife (Jennifer Warren) and young son, and Genevieve Bujold is Jeanne Leroy, an immigrant from Paris who travels by boat to America with her photographer husband Francis (Francis Huster) to start a new life. Eventually Jeanne and Francis make their way west, set up a photography business in Redland, Texas and raise a daughter while David experiences a personal tragedy when his wife is raped and murdered by three drifters. Jeanne also experiences hardships after her husband is killed in a senseless shooting but she finds a kindred spirit and more in David after they meet through their children's feisty schoolteacher (Susan Tyrrell). Although Lelouch's concept is epic in scope, his execution is intimate, focusing more on relationships and the day to day details of life on the frontier, while occasionally referencing then-historic events (newspaper headlines announcing the death of Billy the Kid, etc.) that place the time period and setting in a broader context. Certainly violent events occur but they are downplayed or minimized, even David's encounter with the three men who raped and murdered his first wife toward the end of the film. Filmed on location in Arizona (near Tucson) and on the Burbank lot, Another Man, Another Chance is shot in a dusty golden hue (by cinematographers Stanley Cortez and Jacques Lefrancois) that approximates the look of old photographs as well as the way the light looks out West. The movie is also bilingual, providing English subtitles for the French-speaking sections of the film and using snatches of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for dramatic emphasis at certain points. (Reputedly, a version of the film with the French passages dubbed into English was also distributed in the U.S. in certain regions.) Despite the film's novelty and two charismatic, immensely appealing actors in the lead roles, Another Man, Another Chance was not a box office success and was championed by very few critics. Lelouch had hoped that the film's success would allow him to make more movies in the U.S., a country he had great affection for, but he would soon return to France where he still remains active as a film director.