Le jour et l'heure

René Clément comes back to his favorite subject:WW2.His filmography boasts two of the most important films dealing with it:"les maudits" (1947) and "jeux interdits" (1952).Other works include documentary "la bataille du rail"(1945) and "le père tranquille"(1946) .

There were two more WW2 movies in the sixties;Clement had become more interested in thrillers though:he came in blaring with "plein soleil "(purple noon-the first version of "the talented M.Ripley)but did not go out the same way as his thrillers became more and more abysmal in the late sixties and seventies)

"Le jour et l'heure" although much inferior to the four war movies mentioned above,is still watchable today.Simone Signoret and Stuart Whitman are very talented leads and they get good support from Geneviève Page.Signoret portrays a woman who could not dabble with the idea of going into resisting during the Occupation.All she wanted is to lead a quiet life so she buried her head in the sand.Little did she know she would be involved in a dangerous mission :first reluctantly,she had to help English pilot Whitman escape from occupied France .

Clement's liking for thriller surfaces in the scene which takes place on the train ,a very suspenseful sequence.

Clément 's last war movie "Paris brûle-t-il?" (1966) yielded beneath the weight of its fifty stars who literally drowned it out.