The New Pictures

Premier May (Continental) is an intricate little French exercise as formally organized as a rondo, and bearing much the same sort of charm. In the course of a day, a baby is born, a pretty girl gets engaged, a boy learns the facts of life and, in his own way, so does his father. Writer-Director Luis Saslavsky's soft-voiced theme is that no one of these things could have happened unless all the others did too.

May Day begins with the whole family together. But the girl takes off for a day of carnival fun, and Papa is instructed to take the boy to a match de football. Reason for the outing is that Mama feels her first labor pains coming on, and since the boy still thinks that babies are bought from pushcart peddlers, it is prudent to post him elsewhere. In a scene of superb comic tenderness, Papa attempts to explain where children really come from, and bears up just fine until his relentlessly inquisitive child asks: "But, Papa, where do you plant the seed?''

A casual acquaintance of Papa's, a gambling-house shill, lures him to the roulette table, and the cops raid the joint. Poor Papa is booked at the station, and the boy must run home to fetch his identification card. From the sight of his mother in the midst of a difficult accouchement, the notion of the pushcart peddler is banished. All that remains for the boy to do is get Mama to the hospital, spring Papa from the jug, and reunite the whole gang in time for the birth of baby sister.

Director Saslavsky has run this multi-gaited film at a graceful trot midway between all-out comedy and lead-footed sentimentality. As the repentant Papa, Yves Montand contributes most to the picture's warm stability; but it is skinny-shanked Yves Noel, as the boy, who rates credit for its glow.

Man from the West (Mirisch; United Artists) puts Gary Cooper back in the saddle after an interim of a couple of years in which he grey-flanneled it around Paris with Audrey Hepburn (Love in the Afternoon) and Manhattan with Suzy Parker (Ten North Frederick). To celebrate the occasion, the producer has given him De Luxe Color and even a welcome home from one of the other characters, who says admiringly: "You look good back up on that hoss." At 57, Coop does look fine; it is the picture that needs to get up off its haunches.

Things start with one of those tidy little coincidences necessary to full implausibility. Link Jones (Gary Cooper), a onetime gunslinger who has been improving his character by homesteading for two decades, sets out on a train for Fort Worth to bring back a schoolteacher for his town. With him on the train are two other travelers with speaking roles--Julie London as a cafe singer, and Arthur

O'Connell as a card shark. When the choo-choo gets bullyragged by a few robbers at a wood stop, all three have inadvertently been left behind. But old home week is only just beginning. The "deserted" cabin in which the abandoned trio hopes to spend the night turns out to be chock-full of Cooper's childhood chums, now hiding out in well-whiskied obscurity.

Chief chum is Uncle Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb), a scorpion of yesteryear gone jellied in the head. When he sees Cooper, youthful memories flow like a slashed artery: "Remember? We walked outa that bank with $11,000 . . . We murdered old Ben Scull together . .. There's no guts any more." Well, almost none. Julie London interests the boys: "Start takin' off yer cloze," growls one of them, "real slow." In the nick (a knife has been held against his throat), Cooper saves Julie from a censor worse than death, and she coos gratefully: "I never met a man like you."

Wearying of stripteases, Cobb decides that he and his unsavory little band will make a comeback by heisting the local trust company, and that peace-loving Gary will ride with them. Viewers will not be surprised that Cooper outfoxes and outguns every last one of that old gang of his. As the inconvenienced cafe singer, real-life Cafe Singer London is as straight-from-the-bodice as Cooper is straight-from-the-shoulder.

The Barbarian and the Geisha (20th Century-Fox). One sunny day in 1953, Director John Huston was lolling around in Ravello with Writer Truman (Other Voices, Other Rooms) Capote, and having nothing better to do. they decided to make a movie. They gathered up Humphrey Bogart, Gina Lollobrigida, Jennifer Jones. Robert Morley and Peter Lorre, who were also lolling, and threw them all into the thing, wrote it as they went along, and turned out Beat the Devil, a masterpiece of shaggy-dog movie comedy. Director Huston should have quit while he was ahead. In filming Barbarian, he tried the same casual approach ("It looks as though we might have the story finished before the picture is." cracked Writer Charles Grayson), and ouch! --there goes 3,000,000 bucks.

Huston's story allegedly centers around one Townsend Harris, a teetotaling bachelor who in 1856 became America's first consul general in Japan after Admiral Perry's gunboats persuaded the empire to abandon its centuries of total isolation. One of the characters who entered his life was, perhaps, a laundress named Oki-chi, whom he saw twice when she came to pick up his dirty linen. In Huston's freewheeling version, Okichi is a luscious geisha, and the consul is John Wayne.

Against the protests of the provincial governor, Wayne lands at Shimoda with a diplomatic sneer on his lips for the scenery, and a kind word of thanks for his quarters: "This'll do." After a prolonged snubbing by the governor, Wayne finally gets asked to dinner--and promptly leers at the prettiest geisha, Old Laundress Okichi (Japanese Stripper Eiko Ando). She moves into his house, which solves some of his problems, but he is still annoyed at the delay in gaining accreditation. "I didn't come here to give information to the Agriculture Department." snaps Wayne, six years before the U.S. had an Agriculture Department. He anticipates the speeches of Abraham Lincoln just as surely. When he has finally gained entrance to the shogun's palace and is being questioned about U.S. traffic in slaves, he squares his shoulders and croaks: "It cannot long endure."

Neither will moviegoers. Director Huston's eye for the limpid beauty of Japan's gardens, houses, temples and harbors is outstandingly true, but this time his ear and his touch have gone sour.

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