Is "When I lived in Berlin, I had seen the movie three times" grammatical?

Today I read the following description of preterite perfect in The Cambridge Grammar of English Language.

The distinction between the present perfect and the simple preterite is neutralized elsewhere in the verbal system, so that when have carries any other inflection than the present tense the perfect may correspond to either a present perfect or a simple preterite. Compare, for example:

i(a) He has lost his key so he can't get in his room.

i(b) He had lost his key so he couldn't get in his room.

i(c) He seems to have lost his key so he can't get in his room.

ii(a) He lost his key while he was running home.

ii(b) He had lost his key while he was running home.

ii(c) He seems to have lost his key while he was running home,

In [i] the non-present perfects had lost and have lost correspond to present perfect has lost, while in [ii] they correspond to the simple preterite lost.

Then, can i(b) and ii(b) be rephrased as i(b') and ii(b') below respectively?

i(b') He has lost his key so he couldn't get in his room.

ii(b') He lost his key while he was running home.

And this is my main question. Is the following sentence grammatical?

(1) When I lived in Berlin, I had seen the movie three times.

I thought had seen should be replaced by saw to make it acceptable.

Solution 1:

You are quite right to think that using the simple past tense as in "when I lived in Berlin, I saw the movie thrice" is the simplest construction, if the sentence is to be taken in isolation. However, using the past perfect in your original example "when I lived in Berlin, I had seen the film thrice" is not incorrect, because 'when I lived in Berlin' is not meant here as a temporally isolated event, but refers to a certain period of time ('in the days when I was living in Berlin') and therefore past perfect is acceptable in 'I had seen the movie thrice'; it may even be more appropriate, depending on the context, as I shall illustrate below.

Past perfect tense is usually used to place an event in time-context, usually as having occurred 'before' some more recent event or a specified point in time, as in

I reached the station at 5pm, but the train had left 5 minutes earlier.

We had invited the Smiths to the party, but they could not make it.

So the use of past perfect in "when I lived in Berlin, I had seen the movie three times" can very well be more appropriate in the right context relative to the sentences that precede and / or succeed it, and also if you were to use it as a clause within a longer sentence, such as (for example)

My friend asked me about the movie 'Spartacus'. When I lived in Berlin, I had seen the movie thrice. So I could tell him that it was very good!

They invited me to see the movie 'Spartacus', but when I lived in Berlin, I had seen the movie three times, so I politely declined the invitation.