D-Day-Minus-One

36 Hours. The man stirs himself to consciousness, sits up in bed blinking. Outside the window he sees nurses, MPs, patients in wheelchairs, the routine bustle of a U.S. military hospital in occupied Germany. He picks up a copy of Stars and Stripes. It is dated May 15, 1950, and the headlines jolt him: PRESIDENT WALLACE SPEAKS IN

IDAHO. FORMER PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT VACATIONS AT WARM SPRINGS.

What is this? A joke? A nightmare? Insanity? It turns out to be a bit of all three, for headlines, history and the hospital itself are fictions of an ingenious Nazi conspiracy. The date is really June 1944. Only hours remain until Dday, and the man is a U.S. Army major (James Garner) privy to top-secret details of the Allied landings in Normandy. On a mission to Lisbon, Garner has been drugged and kidnaped, smuggled off to the Reich as a corpse. He awakes with six years of his life supposedly lost in amnesia. The story becomes credible to him when a lissome blonde nurse (Eva Marie Saint) shows up wearing his mother's wedding band. "We were married two months ago tomorrow," she tells him.

Though 36 Hours treats World War II as a preposterous parlor game, for the first hour Writer-Director George Seaton makes it tingling fun to play. The plot sizzles along, so intricately contrived that the film is half over before an audience realizes that the characters tangled up in it are a fairly standard crew. Unfortunately, once the puzzle has fallen into place, the movie goes to pieces. Hero Garner and Collaborator Saint plow doggedly through the rubble to discover anew that there is nothing like a tight squeeze for bringing people together, while Rod Taylor, as a Nazi medico imbued with Yankee sportsmanship, reveals that he became a menace only to serve mankind. In the frayed formula ending, Writer Seaton has sabotaged his outlandish melodrama, like a man who strides into battle armed with a formidable secret weapon and hobbles out brandishing a mere slingshot.

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