THOUGH it's Couch Potato who says it as shouldn't, most of the movies

(even the good ones) that drop by for a few stiff drinks in this

last-chance saloon of the motion picture arts are well within our

critical scope -- or, come to that, almost anyone else's -- and if Couch

Potato generally errs a little towards generosity, it's partly because a

video column that erred towards meanness would be pretty depressing for

everyone involved, not least the companies who furnish the raw

materials.

The downside of this critical benignity, unfortunately, is that every

lucky once in a while a film comes along that exposes the shocking rate

of inflation of the currency of praise. Such a film is Marcel Carne's

magnificent Les Enfants Du Paradis (retail, #15.99/1945, b. and w.;

subtitled; cert. PG), a tender lowlife fantasy and metaphor for wartime

France that reminds us forcibly just what movies should be about:

exhilaration, magic, and joy.

Set among the raffish theatrical and underworld characters who throng

nineteenth-century Paris's Theatre Des Funambules in the Boulevard du

Crime, Carne's ''tribute to theatre'' is basically a love story. The

beautiful and free-spirited actress Garance (Arletty, the aloof and

ethereal leading lady of several French films of the moody-romance

school) has four beaux to her string in the persons of mime artist

Jean-Louis Barrault, leading man Pierre Brasseur, aristocrat Louis

Salou, and vicious but suspiciously redeemable-looking professional

criminal Marcel Herrand.

They all live and move and have their being in a world of unofficial

people on society's shadiest margins, the frequenters of the cheapest

and rowdiest seats in the theatre (in the gods, actually: hence The

Children of Paradise), and it is these highly unrespectable types whose

vitality and humanity Carne celebrates in contrast to the film's several

mean, buttoned-up authority figures; the parallel with the Nazi

occupation is clear, but never forced.

The film's structure is dreamlike and impressionistic rather than

linear, and the correspondences between the story of the film and the

stories enacted on the stage of the Theatre des Funambules drift

tantalisingly in and out of relevance as Arletty's lovers jostle for

supremacy. Pictorially, to quote the Woody Allen feature we reviewed

last week, it's a thing of shadows and fog, but for all that it's the

fastest-playing three-hour movie we ever saw. By the end, almost every

character's life is more or less a shambles, but we have the feeling

that they've truly lived, and that most of them will live to live

another day.

''When I started out'', actor and cult director John Cassavetes once

said, ''I wanted to make Frank Capra movies''. Frankly, we'd have been a

long time guessing that one: somehow one just doesn't see James Stewart

or Cary Grant in harsh, loud-mouthed toughies like his finest and most

commercial (though that isn't saying very much) hour, The Killing Of A

Chinese Bookie (1978/retail, #12.99; cert. 15). Ben Gazzara stars as the

owner of an up-market Los Angeles strip club, the Crazy Horse West, to

which he has a sentimental but unprofitable attachment that makes life

very difficult for the Mob boys who want him to see sense and accept an

offer he'd be very unwise to refuse. This oddly skewed little

gangsterama packs a punch and a sense of humour that many conventionally

''better'' crime pictures lack, and if your taste in villainy runs to

the style of vintage 1940s B-crimmies, it might be just your can of

safety stock.

Competition Corner! hits the stage again with a double-feature

giveaway: top of the bill is Les Enfants Du Paradis, with which the mecs

at Artificial Eye have kindly provided us three copies for lucky people

who can remind us who was Arletty's leading man in Marcel Carnes classic

1939 gloomerama Le Jour Se Leve. Plus which: courtesy of Electric

Pictures, we have one set of three John Cassavetes reissues (Killing Of

A Chinese Bookie, plus his 1977 backstage-Broadway melo Opening Night,

and the compulsively unpleasant 1974 unhappy-family drama A Woman Under

The Influence. To win these, name the former Busby Berkeley musicals

star with a leading role in Opening Night. Answers, as ever, to Couch

Potato (Cult Movies Prizes), The Herald, 195 Albion Street, Glasgow G1

1QP.