René Clément all but invented the resistance movie in France and returned to the topic several times. This story of an American flier and a Frenchwoman avoids political sentiment and escapist excesses, concentrating on Simone Signoret’s luminous performance as a woman facing the worst that Occupied France could dish out. It’s a multi-language production, filmed from Paris to the Pyrenees. Stuart Whitman is the American pilot, and the French cast is choice: Geneviève Page, Michel Piccoli, and Reggie Nalder.

The Day and the Hour
aka Le Jour et L’Heure
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1963 / B&W / 2:35 widescreen / 110 min. / Street Date August 15, 2023 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Simone Signoret, Stuart Whitman, Geneviève Page, Michel Piccoli, Reggie Nalder, Billy Kearns, Marcel Bozzuffi, Pierre Dux, Henri Virlojeux, Hénia Suchar, Hubert de Lapparent.
Cinematography: Henri Decaë
Production Designer: Berbard Eveub
Film Editor: Fedora Zincone
Assistant director: Costa-Gavras
Music Composer: Claude Boelling
Screenplay by André Barret, adaptation by René Clément, Roger Vailland, English dialogue by Clément Biddle Wood
Produced by Jacques Bar
Directed by René Clément

Film fans familiar with morale-boosting WW2 fare have seen at least one of those movies about American and British fliers, shot down over France, being sheltered by patriotic members of the resistance. The handsome airmen invariably make love to the beautiful mademoiselles that hide them in attics and barns. Everybody promises to meet up later after the grand victory, with fatherless children apparently not a problem.

The respected old-school director René Clément is best known for the superb  Forbidden Games,  Gervaise and  Purple Noon. The first film is about orphans of the German blitzkrieg, but Clément’s first show was a 1946 semi-documentary about the resistance of French railroad workers,  The Battle of the Rails. His 1947  Les maudits is a masterpiece about axis villains fleeing to South America, filmed on a real German U-Boat. Clément later made an effort to establish himself as an international director, a plan stopped by the commercial failure of his 1966 super-epic that told the entire story of the liberation of the capital,  Is Paris Burning?.

Three years earlier, René Clément directed a more modest look set in Occupied France, just before D-Day. Fifty years ago many of us American kids knew what the title  The Day and the Hour meant … in 1944, much of the world and all of France waited nervously for the expected invasion of France.

If anything, Le Jour et L’Heure is almost too low-key. It plays out mostly in a workaday Paris, where people do their best to subsist and avoid the political chaos around them. The world is upside down, the future is a question mark, yet most people ‘go about their business.’  (Hmmm.) The movie certainly isn’t cheap. Scenes in railroad stations use hundreds of extras.

Thérèse Dutheil (Simone Signoret) lives in a nice flat with her two children and her sister-in-law Agathe (Geneviève Page). Her return from a visit to the country is slowed by a manhunt for three Allied fliers that have been shot down. Thérèse asks for a truck ride back with old friend Antoine (Michel Piccoli) — who doesn’t mind getting her tangled up in his risky mission: he’s transporting the airmen to Paris in a truck full of sheep.

When the fliers are hidden in a neighborhood pharmacie Thérèse begs off further involvement. Then she sees one of the fugitives, U.S.A.A.C. Captain Allan Morley (Stuart Whitman) on the street, trying to figure out the Métro system. He eventually gets drunk and crashes the night at her place. Thérèse endeavors to help Morley and his fellow U.S. airman Pat Riley (Billy Kearns of Purple Noon) catch a rail connection to Toulouse. That begins a harrowing ordeal on a packed Southbound train. The trio know they’re in trouble when she recognizes a man she saw back at the pharmacy: he must be a Gestapo agent (Reggie Nalder).

After the ultra-detailed realism of Le maudits, we don’t know what to make of many details in The Day and the Hour. Clément and his co-writer Roger Vailland ( Blood and Roses) don’t offer a full study of the Occupation. With store shelves in Paris often bare, Thérèse’s trip to the country was likely to buy fresh food. Thérèse’s children attend school normally, it seems. We expect a possible betrayal by Agathe, but that doesn’t happen. The populace is split between those trying to remain apolitical (Thérèse), outright ‘collabos’ that do the Germans’ bidding, and people that passively collaborate out of a desire for security — like Agathe. The Dutheil family owns a lot of property, and Agathe doesn’t want it taken away.

The story hasn’t the shape of a typical thriller. We see Thérèse and Agathe send their younger sister off to serve as a nun, where she’ll at least be somewhere safe. Later on, a cutaway in a railroad station sees a resistance woman being taken away by the cops. Most of the resistance people Thérèse met have already been arrested.

The Day and the Hour is written for a French audience, so it helps if one knows a little about the Occupation. The black-uniformed men wearing berets are ‘collaborationist’ Frenchmen working for the Germans, lower-level ‘French Gestapo.’  Antoine all but announces his mission at a roadside stop, where the locals jokingly (?) accuse him of being collabo. We’re more attuned to escapist thrillers in which Gestapo agents are everywhere, ready to round up twenty people at a time. Use the wrong hand gesture and you’re a goner. When Captain Morley goes wandering in public, he sticks out like a sore thumb. He also speaks out-loud with Thérèse on the sidewalk, broadcasting his Montana accent. We wonder why he isn’t immediately picked up. Could someone who looks so ‘Yankee’ stroll through occupied Paris and not immediately attract suspicion?

In terms of “movie-sense” it also feels illogical that the resistance activists in the pharmacy aren’t more careful. Any customer might realize what’s going on inside. Reggie Nalder’s Nazi agent had the pharmacy staked out before the flyers arrived. He doesn’t scoop up Morley, Thérèse and Pat because he wants to follow them to catch others in the (presumed) underground railroad to Spain. Reggie Nalder’s presence screams ‘villain.’  His casting is not the film’s most creative choice.

True accounts of the Occupation speak of sophisticated subterfuge as well as hopelessly amateurish resistance efforts … and it wasn’t always the amateurs who were caught. Are Clément and Co. making a statement about that, or are they just more interested in the development of the personal relationship?

In that the film is very successful. Thérèse does no soul-searching before she risks life and limb to help the Captain. It’s just a natural thing that happens, even if it means (we should think) putting her kids and Agathe at risk too. It’s an emotional choice, as if she were moved to help a stray dog. Blind luck plays a major role. When braced by German ID-checkers on the train, Captain Morley’s forged papers pass. When she can’t find her own ID Thérèse expects the worst. But she’s spared by an unexpected twist of fate.

The show defuses some expectations of a lovers-on-the-run story. The attraction feels real, even though most of it comes from Thérèse Dutheil’s side of the equation. Simone Signore is superb. Her Thérèse deals with events as they occur, and never loses her head. She and Morley are eventually captured and interrogated by a collaborating Inspector and magistrate. Insp. Lerat (Marcel Bozzuffi of  The French Connection) proves that the fugitives know each other by molesting Thérèse to see Morley’s reaction. The Captain is a flier, not a commando fighter; he’s already been decked on the train and is no match for the back-room torturers.

Ms. Signoret convinces when her Thérèse pulls off a highly unlikely dodge. She intuits that Commissioner Marboz (Pierre Dux of Is Paris Burning?) is also concerned about ‘the day and the hour,’ and worried about potential reprisals when the Allied liberators arrive — will there mass hangings of the collabo police and judiciary?  Thérèse and Morley’s luck is awfully good, especially after Lerat and Marboz confuse her with a high-level resistance target known only as ‘Louise.’

The finale goes for emotional realism, not spellbinding suspense. ^*  When they’re picked up by the Maquis (pro-DeGaulle militia), Morley gets a good grilling before an OSS agent declares him trustworthy. He’ll be smuggled back so he can fly again, but God knows what will become of Thérèse or her loved ones back in Paris. It doesn’t matter, as Clément and Vaillard arrange for a hopeful farewell that may or may not result in a future reunion. Again, Signoret does most of the heavy lifting in the thespic department.

Henri Decaë’s cinematography is excellent. Clément was known for surmounting difficult technical problems, and the claustrophobic scenes in the jammed train stations are 100% convincing, even in anamorphic Franscope. We feel as if we’re jammed into those over-crowded train coaches along with the actors. As most of the border between France and Spain is mountainous, this show would seem more accurate than John Sturges’ classic  The Great Escape, wherein James Coburn has only to cross an idyllic field to reach the haven of ‘España.’

A question that I wish the commentary had addressed: Antoine’s truck has some kind of pipe in its side from which live flames come out. If he’s got some kind of gasoline substitute fuel working, what is it?  We see other vehicles carrying propane tanks …

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of The Day and the Hour is a polished presentation in flawless B&W ‘scope. Its co-production status is marked by an MGM logo, but the movie feels French all the way through.

We like that Clément made this a multi-language picture. The French speak French, and Simone Signoret’s Thérèse must converse with Captain Morley in English. We wish the several language versions of Is Paris Burning could be re-mixed this way, for the sake of realism. When we watch that show, I tend to click back and forth between language mixes.

A problem for hearing-challenged viewers is that the English subs do not transcribe the English part of the dialog.

The soundtrack has a strong theme by Claude Boelling, the composer of the musical success  Borsalino. But the only romantic theme is a classic pop song by Charles Trenét.

Kino gives us the original French trailer. It is an excellent, progressive collage of moments with Signoret and an invented Thérèse soliloquoy. It really piques our interest, without selling the show as an action picture.

Samm Deighan’s audio commentary is something of a life saver — her information about the Occupation and its depiction in the culture and movies is essential. She notes that the number of movies about the holocaust increased in response to the 1961 Eichmann trial. But movies about the moral quagmire of French collaboration were slow to arrive, as with like Claude Chabrol’s  Line of Demarcation. We’re convinced that René Clément’s higher-profile epic Is Paris Burning? was ‘influenced’ to look more kindly on the role of the French police during the Occupation. That show makes a special effort to exonerate the Parisian flics by involving them in the early stages of the anti-Nazi uprising.

Deighan says Alain Delon recommended Stuart Whitman for this role. She recognizes that there isn’t a powerful chemistry between Whitman and Signoret, but that it doesn’t harm the movie … Thérèse is actually very isolated, and we concentrate mostly on her.

Producer Jacques Bar has a unique filmography — he started in the late 1940s with odd shows like the science fiction Garou Garou, le passe-muraille, a comedy about a man who can walk through walls. But he proceeded to great work with directors Federico Fellini, Jules Dassin, Luis Buñuel, René Clément, Henri Verneuil and Jacques Deray.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Day and the Hour
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good ++
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent One track with French, English and German
Supplements:
Audio commentary with
Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (only for French and German dialogue)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: March 8, 2026
(7479hour)

^*  If you want to see lame escapist thrills about fleeing Nazis, check out the terrible ‘on to freedom’ finale of the too-clever  36 Hours.  If you want to go the other way, with an oppressive account of what it really might be like to be on Death Row in a Gestapo prison, see Robert Bresson’s harrowing  A Man Escaped.

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