Another Man, Another Chance (1977)

James Caan is David Williams, a veterinarian who settles in the West against the wishes of his wife, who yearns for a return to Philadelphia.

Genevieve Bujold is Jeanne, a young French girl who falls for a photographer and winds up on the Western frontier.

Years later they meet, after both have lost their spouses to violence, after both have been left as single parents.

Genevieve has been planning a return to France with her daughter, Sarah, as soon as she can raise enough money.

But she didn’t figure on falling in love with a Westerner who refuses to wear a gun, who talks to animals as though they were human, but who isn’t afraid to use a gun when he stumbles upon the men who raped and killed his wife.

Review:

Eleven years earlier, director Claude Lelouch made “A Man and a Woman,” set in modern times with much the same premise. He need not have bothered trying a Western.

Sure, he served up a beautiful-looking film and some imaginative scenes,. Like Caan playing pool on horseback in a saloon. And like the settler’s hilarious attempt for circle the wagons during an Indian threat.

But the film is horribly slow-paced for the amount of action it offers. Until the leads meet and begin to fall for one another. Then they seem to fall in love way too quickly.

It doesn’t help that neight of the men in Jeanne’s life seem very admirable. Caan’s character could care less about his first wife’s well-founded concern about spending so much time alone at their remote home. Jeanne’s first husband is a smart-ass to everyone else around him.

Susan Tyrell has an interesting role as Alice, a whore trying to reinvent herself as owner of a boarding house where she teachers youngsters about Jesse James and Sam Bass. But she also disappears for the last hour of the film.

In the cast list below, Sarah is Jeanne’s daughter; Simon is David Williams’ son.

Directed by:
Claude Lelouch

Cast:
James Caan … David Williams
Genevieve Bujold … Jeanne
Francis Huster … Francis Leroy
Susan Tyrell … Alice
Jennifer Warren … Mary Williams
Rossie Harris … Simon
Linda Lee Lyons … Sarah
Fred Stuthman … Mary’s father
Diana Douglas … Mary’s mother
Michael Berryman … Bandit
Richard Farnsworth … Stage driver
Jean-Francois Remi … Jeanne’s father
Walter Barnes … Foster

Runtime: 126 min.

Memorable lines:

Jeanne’s father, as she writes about the seige of Paris in her diary: “Are you coming down to the cellar?”
Jeanne: “No, I’m more afraid of crowds than of cannons.”

Saloon owner: “Why don’t you open a boarding house around here?”
Alice, his whore: “Around here, women trust me with their men, not their kids.”

Mary Williams: “My parents have offered to set us up in Philadelphia.”
David Williams: “I don’t want to take care of rich people’s pets.”

Francis Leroy, Jeanne’s first husband, to a friend: “A pessimist is an optimist with experience.”

French photo studio customer: “Where are you going?”
Francis Leroy: “Where the sun always shines for photographers.”
Customer: “Where’s that?”
Francis: “Out West, in America.”

Alice: “Betwee men and children, there isn’t a hell of a lot of difference.”

David Williams to Jeanne LeRoy: “Jeanne, do you think I might have a chance, with time?”
Jeanne: “A gambler always has a chance.”