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 café 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.