Dangers Deja Vus

The Day and the Hour turns up a decade or two late. An old-helmet romantic drama about occupied France, it has Simone Signoret as the chic Parisienne who is drawn into the Resistance movement by the irresistible U.S. flyer (Stuart Whitman). Together they make their way to a bittersweet parting at the Spanish border, along an underground route as familiar as the Champs-Elysees.

Surprisingly, though, the story seldom lags, mainly because some first-chop talents go at it as if the idea were spanking-new. Director Rene Clement (Forbidden Games) mounts several taut scenes, especially one in which passengers aboard a crowded train seize a Gestapo agent and fling him onto the rails. Fortunately, too, the dialogue by Novelist Roger Vailland neatly sidesteps heroics. "The war doesn't interest me," drawls Signoret, whose husband is safely lodged in a P.W. camp.

All Simone wants is to curl up in her plush Paris flat, keeping her children happy and her cupboards full until war's end. When a chance encounter throws Whitman into her lap for safekeeping, Signoret registers magnificent dismay. "I'm not his mother," she objects. Grace `a Dieu!

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