French director Claude Lelouch, who won an Oscar in 1966 for his syrupy A Man and a Woman, just loves to trace family histories. This time four families—American, French, German and Russian—are involved in either dance or music. The four husbands go off to World War II, the unifying event in the film, and two of them die; the remainder of the movie is taken up with telling how the survivors fare. James Caan plays a hotshot American bandleader, Geraldine Chaplin his French-born wife. The rest of the actors, all Europeans unfamiliar to American audiences, are uniformly fine. Watch especially for Jorge Donn, a regular with the Maurice Béjart dance company, who is sensational as the Russian dancer; his face will haunt moviegoers long after the film ends. There are some touching scenes, especially one where a French lawyer, Robert Hossein, is reunited with his mother. Lelouch can be too cute in spots: Using the same actors to play both parents and children of the war generation is distracting at first, although Caan pulls it off with amazing skill. And the final sequence, which brings the four stories together, is worth the whole three-hour length of the film: Béjart's dance company does a stirring interpretation of Ravel's Bolero with the Paris skyline as the background. (In French with English subtitles) (Not rated)
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