Intertwined Destinies

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.

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The Cunning Inspector Cockrill

Classic movie lovers in the U.S. probably know Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge in the perennial holiday favorite, A Christmas Carol, the 1951 version. He is also memorable for his supporting role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) but, more importantly, British comedy fans adore Sim specifically for his eccentric comedic characters in such popular films as The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950), Laughter in Paradise (1951) and Innocents in Paris (1953). Less familiar to American audiences but guaranteed to turn you into an Alastair Sim fanatic if you’re not one already is Green for Danger, a 1946 suspense thriller starring Sim as the sly-as-a-fox Inspector Cockrill.

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