Lana Turner, Barry Sullivan, Glynis Johns, Sean Connery. Dir. Lewis Allen, Paramount, 1958
Another Time, Another Place, Sean Connery's screen debut, figures in pop culture for more than just the first James Bond's starting point. In 1974, Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry titled his second solo record the same. I could accept that as coincidental, but Glynis Johns also starred in a British drama titled Flesh&Blood. Which, of course, is the name of Roxy Music's 1980 LP. Two coincidences seems a bit of a stretch. Naming his albums for UK films he may well have known as a boy - Flesh&Blood came out in 1951, Another Time... in '58 - fits with Ferry's sense of style, but the real question is, did Ferry have a thing for Glynis Johns?
I'm sure some deep-diving online research could yield a definitive answer, but I find the suggestion tantalising and evocative enough as it is, and I want to talk about the very pleasant surprise I had in Another Time, Another Place.
The picture opens on two British sappers working to defuse an unexploded warhead on a V2 rocket in London days before Germany surrenders. BBC reporter Mark Trevor (Connery) and American war correspondent Sarah Scott (Turner) use their coverage of the incident as an excuse to meet, their schedules making dates impossible in the last weeks of war. The scene cuts between the sapper's attempts to defuse the bomb without detonation and the lovers' tryst, a rather elegant metaphor for what their relationship becomes in the lives of their friends and spouses in the month immediately following the war's end.
Turner is engaged to be engaged to her publisher, Reynolds Carter (Barry Sullivan) while Connery turns out to have a wife and child in the fictional seaside town of St. Giles. Turner breaks off her romance with Sullivan, but Connery, though he makes vague promises to do the same with his family, dies in a plane crash on his way to Paris. Turner suffers a mental break from the news and convalesces in a sanitarium, where she decides to travel to Trevor's hometown before her ship to America sails from Plymouth. Looking for his house, she meets Brian, Trevor's son, and Kay, Trevor's widow, who invites Turner for tea. One thing leads to another and Turner, still suffering the shock of her grief for Mark, winds up becoming Kay's boarder. It's only a matter of time before Johns finds out the truth and that unexploded bomb metaphor goes live.
Another Time, Another Place isn't that much different than the US melodramas Douglas Sirk made around the same time, and if it's not quite as fresh as those, Director Allen elicits strong performances from the ensemble, particularly Johns, Sullivan, and Connery. Just four years away from the role that set his career, Dr. No, Connery is smooth, urbane, earnest, and goddamn beautiful to behold. The camera fell in love with him the first second he stepped before it. The camera always loved Turner, too, but she's not quite the equal of her costars and has a tendency to overemote that clashes with the rest of the cast's restraint. Johns, eight years away from her own iconic film, Mary Poppins, was obviously cast, dressed, and made up so as not to give Turner, at 37 a good decade older than Connery or Johns, competition, but her intelligence, charm, and dramatic chops allow her to stand equal to Turner regardless of glamour. Barry Sullivan, viewed as a B-lister in Hollywood, nevertheless has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for movies, the other for TV. (He did at least one guest-star appearance on most every show Rick Dalton worked in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.) Watching him work here, the mystery isn't why he rated two Stars but why he never stepped up to the A-list.
As for Mr. Ferry's possible fascination with Ms. Johns, an alternate theory might have it that he would have killed a vicar for even one of the Saville Row suits Connery and the other British actors wear. It is not difficult to imagine Ferry's nostalgia for this kind of film. If I had been alive in 1958 England, I would likely feel the same.
Not incredible, but very good. An ideal escape on a frigid February night. Worth your time.
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