Golden Western

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

ANOTHER MAN, ANOTHER CHANCE

Directed by Claude Lelouch

Screenplay by Claude Lelouch

This time Claude Lelouch has dressed his basic movie--the one in which boy takes interminable amounts of time to meet girl--in chaps and cowboy boots. He (James Caan) is a frontier veterinarian; she (Genevieve Bujold) is a French immigrant to the American West in the 1870s. The thing that delays their inevitable meeting for half the picture is the fact that both are married, and it takes a while for absurdist circumstances to dispatch their spouses so that they can conveniently run into each other, hesitate and then finally get together.

It is not the most novel of plots, but Lelouch's zestfully romantic spirit has hurtled several of his films over the banality barrier in the past. Unfortunately, he stumbles here and takes all his colleagues in this odd venture with him.

What trips him up is a shameless technical ineptitude that is astonishing to discover in the work of a veteran. Lelouch wants, quite literally, to bathe the golden West in a golden light, a desire that leads him to shoot most of the movie through filters supplying that light to his color film.

He also wants to show it hazily, as if in memory. The result is that it is hard to see the actors, and even more difficult to get emotionally involved with these shadows. This is especially true because for some reason Lelouch has decided that the closeup is the invention of the devil and to be avoided like sin.

Then there is the sound track to consider. The musical score consists largely of the repetition, usually at inappropriate moments, of the opening statement of Beethoven's Fifth. Beyond that, there is no authentic presence on the track -- no jingling spurs, no creaking leather, not so much as a chirping bird. The result is stupefying. Anyone unlucky enough to be caught in a theater where Another Man, Another Chance is playing must pray that one of his fellow sufferers will have about him one of the noisemakers -- something on the order of an old-fash ioned moose call -- that M. Lelouch forgot to bring to his party. It may not compensate for the missing sounds, but it could serve to awaken slumberers in the event of fire.

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