ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER PLACE (1958)

Another Time, Another Place is a low key melodrama about an American columnist living in London (Lana Turner) during WWII. Though she left a fiance back in NY City (who just happens to be her boss), she falls in love with a dashing BBC reporter (a very young, very hot, very bushy-browed Sean Connery) and they carry on with a torrid month-long affair before he lets her in on the fact that he's, er, married and has a young son, whom he loves very much. Well, they part briefly, but their love is too strong and they reconcile on the evening Connery is set to fly to Paris to cover the end of the war. Unfortunately, he's killed in a plane crash, and Lana is devastated.

And that's just the first third of the movie! The rest of it has to do with Lana seeking out Connery's village, "to see where he comes from," where she winds up living with his wife and son, who have no idea who Lana is.

Despite this film's measured pace, and despite the fact that it's melodrama (and why am I behaving as if that's a bad thing? I LOVE this shit!), it's a well-written movie that had me hooked through to the end. Part of reason I liked it has to do with my fascination with Lana Turner, who apparently spent at least half of her career playing women of questionable moral character who put themselves through hell but very often redeem themselves in the end. This film is a typical 50s Lana vehicle: she's promiscuous, she's heartbroken, she has a meltdown, she recuperates, she redeems herself, and she looks fabulous.

The first scene in the film sets the tone and foreshadows how the relationship between Lana and Connery is going to go: it centers on a bomb that falls without detonating, and the tense moments that pass while it's disarmed. Later in the movie, there's a great scene where a group of people are sitting around a table having an awkward conversation because all of them but Connery's widow know that Lana was having an affair with him. The actress who plays Connery's widow, Glynis Johns, is excellent and has her own meltdown scene that rivals those of Lana. On the whole, it's a bit contrived but I had fun watching it and will definitely watch it again.