The New Pictures

Man with the Gun (Goldwyn Jr.; United Artists) has all the splendid cardboard heroics of the classic western. Sheridan City is so terrorized by a villainous rancher named Dade Holman that the panicky citizens hire flint-eyed, flint-faced Robert Mitchum to civilize the community. Inside of ten minutes, four of Holman's badmen are being measured for coffins. Casually holstering his guns, Town-Tamer Mitchum suggests burying at least two of them out on the wild prairie, because "Sheridan City's too small to have such a big cemetery."

But now this saga of Superman on horseback is impeded by a horde of females. First onscreen is dewy-eyed Karen Sharpe, who trembles like a subway grating each time Bob goes roaring past. Next comes imperious Jan Sterling, manageress of a gaggle of dancing girls at the Palace Saloon. Jan has a secret: she is Mitchum's estranged wife, and soon they are exchanging the barbed dialogue that veteran moviegoers recognize as the Hollywood hallmark of true love. Eventually, while his enemies steal up on him from two directions, Mitchum takes that long, long walk down the deserted cow-town street.

Good Morning, Miss Dove (20th Century-Fox) takes a tedious two hours to say good night. A tear-stained biography of a grade-school teacher, it stars Jennifer Jones as the town's prim disciplinarian whose glacial tones can make a hardened hoodlum jump to attention. One fine morning, Jennifer gets a pain in her back and. as she awaits medical attention, launches into the first of a series of flashbacks that show her renouncing her true love (she has to pay back some $11,-ooo her ever-loving daddy embezzled), helping a Polish immigrant to learn English and grow up to write bad plays, rescuing the underprivileged boy from across the tracks, and airily saving the town bank from failing during the Depression. Actress Jones seems to have a fine time portraying the exemplar of all the virtues. However, the town's citizens, all of whom seem to have been in her classroom at one time or another, are a bad argument for her teaching methods. Their jaws drop with astonishment whenever she uses a word of more than two syllables (which she does with lamentable frequency) and, collectively, they have scarcely enough sense to come in out of the rain unless teacher tells them to.

Queen Bee (Columbia) creaks along like a slow train through Arkansas. The huffing-puffing locomotive is Joan Crawford, a siren from Chicago, and what she does to the proud sons and daughters of the Old South is a caution. Pathetic Fay Wray loses her mind when she loses her man to Joan. The luckless man (Barry Sullivan) retires to his room in the mansion house to nurse his bottle and his grudge. His wide-eyed sister, Betsy Palmer, goes out to the stable and hangs herself. Finally. John Ireland, after quivering with rage and lust for 95 minutes, brings things to a happy conclusion by burning himself and Joan alive. Based on a novel by Edna Lee, the film is played as though it were a road company East Lynne, and though packed with synthetic violence, the only thing moviegoers need fear is the flying cliches.

On the Twelfth Day . . . (George K. Arthur),

an entry in this year's Venice Film Festival, is a beautifully designed Christmas card set to the music of the old English carol. The Twelve Days of Christmas. Placed in the sparkling snow of a Victorian London, the film recounts the wooing of Wendy Toye during the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany. Waggish Suitor David O'Brien arrives each morning with a pyramiding progression of flora, fauna and assorted humans that, within a fortnight, have jampacked Wendy's neat home with speckled cows, choirboys, colored doves, milkmaids, kings and pear trees. A pleasant, 22-minute short, the Twelfth Day will get a nationwide network audience on New Year's Day as a color Spectacular over NBCTV.

Diabolique (United) is a film for those with steady nerves and strong stomachs.

Just as in The Wages of Fear, French Producer-Director Henri-Georges Clouzot is out to raise a record crop of goose pimples with a brand-new set of Grand Guignol horrors.

The scene is a boys' school in suburban Paris, a decayed estate that has the look of having spent too much time at the bottom of an aquarium. The swimming pool is covered with a green scum; the magnificent halls are damp and echoing; the pupils riot over a dinner of sausage and potatoes. There are four teachers: two male nonentities and two striking women --frail Vera Clouzot and mannish but beautiful Simone Signoret. Headmaster Paul Meurisse is a reptilian thug who is married to Vera, keeps Simone as his mistress, and treats both of the women abominably.

The girls decide that something must be done and, in a remarkable display of Gallic logic, convince themselves that murder is the answer. They feed Paul a sleeping potion (Simone professionally raises his eyelid with her thumb to be sure he is really out cold) and then drown him in a bathtub while the camera records every detail with an evil relish--right down to putting a heavy bronze lion on his chest to keep his head under water.

After letting him soak in the tub overnight, the girls smuggle the corpse to the school grounds, dump it in the slimy swimming pool. So far, things have merely been brutal. Now Clouzot lights the spirit lamps of the supernatural. When the corpse doesn't float to the surface of the water, the girls drain the pool. There is no dead man at the bottom. Next, a tailor delivers Paul's freshly cleaned and pressed suit to the school. It is the same one he was drowned in. A class photograph is taken; when the picture is developed, there is Paul's face peering malevolently from a school window. A student turns up to report that he was disciplined that morning by the supposedly vanished headmaster.

Simone Signoret has had enough. She flees, and Vera fatalistically awaits her end, aided only by stubble-bearded Charles Vanel, an ambiguous private detective with the disconcerting habit of turning up in her bedroom at midnight to report his progress. The terrors mount to the satisfying crescendo of a Gothic nightmare as Vera, haunted by predawn whispers, creakings and rustlings, retreats to her own bathroom, finds the tub filled with water and containing the staring body of her drowned husband. She dies of heart failure, and Director Clouzot brings his masterly thriller to a shocker of a conclusion that no moviegoer should learn in advance.

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