Another Time_ Another Place

Amazon.com Sean Connery only appears in the pivotal early scenes of Another Time, Another Place, but in his fourth film the future James Bond was already showing superstar potential. This U.S./British melodrama introduced Connery to American audiences in high style: He plays dashing World War II reporter Mark Trevor, first seen covering the defusing of an unexploded German missile in the British countryside. He's joined there by his journalist lover Sara Scott (Lana Turner), who's yet unaware that Trevor has a loving wife (Glynis Johns) and young son to whom he's still openly devoted. When fate takes a unexpected turn, Sara visits Trevor's Cornish village, hoping to learn something more about the man she loved. What happens there gives the film (based on a romantic novel by Lenore Coffee) an added boost of emotional suspense, but director Lewis Allen (best known for helming the taut Frank Sinatra thriller Suddenly) doesn't really have his heart in it, . Turner was 10 years older than Connery (and it shows), and the film feels like a Douglas Sirk leftover--perfectly enjoyable as a standard '50s melodrama (and Paramount's DVD looks and sounds terrific), but not as polished or believable as Sirk's three-hankie classic Imitation of Life, in which Turner starred the following year. Think of this film as Turner's warm-up for Sirk's; both occupy similar emotional territory, and make for a supremely weepy double-feature. --Jeff Shannon