The Man Who Knew Too Little FRANTIC

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Oh, no. Not again. Not the H word. All right. Be strong. Face up to it. H-i-t- c-h-c-o-c-k-i-a-n. There. That wasn't so bad, was it?

And Frantic isn't so bad either. As a matter of fact, it more nearly matches that critical cliche than most of the other movies on which the term is carelessly slapped. One can easily imagine Old Master Slyboots going for Roman Polanski's basic premise.

Dr. and Mrs. Richard Walker (Harrison Ford and Betty Buckley), innocent, middle-class Americans, arrive jet-lagged and grungy in Paris early one morning, their mood unimproved when the taxi bringing them into the city from the airport develops a flat tire. All they can think about is bed and breakfast before they plunge into the medical convention that he is about to address. Oh, yes, and hot showers. Walker is taking his and trying to hear something his wife is saying over the rush of water when she disappears. Just disappears.

The audience can see her exit as he cannot, and there is something distinctly odd, bad-dreamy about her movement out of frame and, as it happens, out of the normality that Polanski so nicely states in his film's early passages. There is something very human about her husband's -- everybody's -- refusal to admit at first that something unusual must have happened. How desperately we cling to the belief that orderliness is immutable.

The hotel people and the police are all Gallic shrugs. Perhaps Madame has a lover? The American embassy is all bureaucracy. See that line over there, buddy? Well, go stand in it, and then we'll listen to your troubles. Walker, whose characterization Ford balances nicely between exasperation and desperation, is all thumbs. He does not speak the language, he never gets to sleep, eat or change his suit, and he keeps stumbling into situations in which he needs all the coordination and smarts that regular habits help to ensure. Hitch at least used to give Cary Grant and James Stewart a minute to straighten their ties.

He also gave them grownup female allies. Poor Richard has to make do with disco-bopping Michele (Emmanuelle Seigner), who is every father figure's nightmare. She is an amiable girl, but without common sense or discernible attention span. It is she, vaporishly bearing Frantic's MacGuffin, who mixes up her bag with the Walkers' luggage at the airport, thus starting off all their troubles.

It is also her character that causes the picture's problems. Polanski and Co-Writer Gerard Brach start by doing too little with her and end by doing too much. They might have exploited the comic possibilities of her dazy nature a little more, especially as the villains grow overtly menacing in their attempts to reclaim their lost luggage. That, though, is a forgivable flaw. The story, too, is busy with other demands that include, refreshingly, a desire to balance the demand for suspense against the need for plausibility. The principals are never tested by situations that require daring or skills beyond the reach of ordinary citizens.

What is not forgivable is the end to which Michele is maneuvered. It is a glaring, blaring atonality, the only conceivable purpose of which is to help , Polanski prove that he is not a Hitchcockian after all -- more serious, don't you know. But why spoil a perfectly enjoyable, often quite imaginative imitation by insisting on that dubious point?