Another Time, Another Place

I've commented in the past about how British studios, or the British production arms of American studios, in the 1950s would make movies with one Hollywood star in the cast so as to try to make it something that would appeal to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic and to make it easier to get distribution in the US. Lana Turner did one of those movies, and it's one I hadn't heard of it until I noticed it on one of the streaming services: Another Time, Another Place.

The setting is London, in early 1945. So World War II is still going on, but it's clear that the Nazis are going to be defeated even though they're still trying to fire V-rockets at England. Lana plays Sara Scott, an American newspaper columnist working for the London branch of a syndicate under boss Carter Reynolds (Barry Sullivan), who is also trying to romance Sara. For the British, the war is hitting closer to home, as we see when British reporter Mark Trevor (Sean Connery) goes to do a radio report on British bomb disposal experts trying to defuse one of the V-rockets the Nazis have sent London's way.

Of course, the real reason we see Mark is because he's been carrying on an affair with Sara, which is a bit of a problem for both of them. I already mentioned that Sara's nominal boss has been trying to get her to marry him. But Mark also has a wife and kid back home in Cornwall, and Mark has finally come to the difficult decision that he's going to go back to them which means having to break off the relationship with Sara. Thankfully, Sara learns this before she breaks off the relationship with Carter, which would be embarrassing if she had broken off that relationship first.

In any case, Sara and Mark's relationship was about to be broken off anyway. Mark has been called to go down to Rome to cover the final capitulation of Italy, with a stopover in Paris first. But in Paris, his plane crashes, killing all the passengers and leaving his wife a widow. Sara more or less has a nervous breakdown over it, forcing Carter to put her in a British sanatarium for several weeks before she can take the ship back to the US.

And then Sara gets out, and decides she's going to do something fairly idiotic: she wants to see Mark's home town in Cornwall before getting on the boat, just to get Mark out of her system. With the war in Europe having come to an end and travel being a bit more common, all the lodgings in Mark's small town are taken, until a nice young boy stops her. It's not difficult to guess that that young boy is Mark's son Brian, who takes her to meet his widowed mom Kay (Glynis Johns). Kay would like to put together a bunch of Mark's scripts for a book in his memory, but hasn't had the emotional energy to do so, especially because she felt like something was wrong for the last month of Mark's life as his letters didn't have as much passion as they had before he met Sara. Not that Kay knows anything about Sara's true identity....

I can see why the producers would think a story like this is a great idea. Unfortunately, the execution is off just enough that there are too many times where instead of serious drama we get unintentionally funny. I can't really imagine Lana Turner's character acting like this in real life, or the Glynis Johns character being that pure. There has to be a reason Mark thought about straying in the first place.

Still, it's interesting to see Sean Connery this early in his career, and playing someone all the way on the opposite side of Britain from his native Scotland. So give it a go and see what you think.