CRITIC’S NOTES : 2 MOVIES: WHEN A BILL OF FARE IS A BILL OF GOODS

Does anyone else out there feel like a social outcast when conversation turns to the movies people “love” recently? For me, the choice is to fall mute at parties to keep from making public scenes or to stuff hard-boiled-egg-and-anchovy canapes in my mouth, which makes others also prefer that I not talk.

Enough of this tyranny.

Currently circulating are a couple of what I’ve come to regard as Emperor’s New Clothes Movies. Right at the top of that list is “Blood Simple” (or “Simple Blood,” as it’s thought of over here in the pariah’s quarters) and “The Gods Must Be Crazy.”

What has been singled out about these movies is what’s so staggering: the playful quality of “Blood Simple,” for example, which leaves you utterly unprepared for its grisliness. Or the quote from one critic that its series of misunderstandings “grow in hilarity even as they remain strictly logical.” You can even read that “Blood Simple” is a debut whose assurance compares with that of “Citizen Kane.” My sainted aunt!

The young Coen brothers, who wrote and directed “Blood Simple,” are long on slick glossy style, no dispute, and they have a nice way with actors. But in this case, style is the sleight-of-hand used to divert us from the thinness of the plot. There is also a difference between assurance and arrogance, and as to its logic, in “Blood Simple” logic is something that is never even tried.

I’ve always suspected that audiences feel departures from sensible behavior as a sort of disturbance factor, even when they haven’t puzzled out what it was that disturbed them. “Blood Simple” couldn’t exist if anyone in it ever pulled their blinds. Even in Texas I don’t believe that an adulterous couple--even an admittedly not-too-bright one on the lam from a dangerous husband--would carry on, in every possible situation, in front of open windows.

This is the very smallest part of why “Blood Simple” drives me wild. What no one writing about the film seems to have felt is the deep unpleasantness of this exercise in empty style, even if you concede the brilliant joke of its final shot, a dying man’s-eye view of the ultimate banality. Please, no letters that this was only a small part of a larger joke. “Blood Simple” is phony “Diabolique” and the joke’s on us.

“The Gods Must Be Crazy” presents a different problem: Try suggesting at a crowded party full of fans of “The Gods” that it succeeds because it continues comfortable racial stereotypes and that its viewpoint toward its engaging central character, a Botswana bushman, is deeply patronizing, and you can have the room to yourself in no time.

This fevered farce about the damage wrought by a tossed Coca-Cola bottle has virtually become sacrosanct, and never more so than with the news that it has grossed $90 million worldwide since 1981. Jamie Uys, its white, South African writer, producer, director, occasional actor, prop man and editor, sounds nicely deprecating in his interviews, which have redoubled recently as he tools up for “Gods II.” In more than one interview, he stresses that everyone in his film is funny, white, black or brown--that what you look for in comedy is the funny side of the human condition, and you don’t see the color.

Sorry, but I still think it’s a film with an insidious point of view, although I don’t doubt that on Uys’ part it’s on an almost unconscious level. You get a hint of that from his answers in a New York Times interview last weekend. Asked about apartheid (no hint of whose existence appears in his movie), Uys answered: “I think it’s a mess. We’ve done some silly, naughty things we’re ashamed of. We’re trying to dismantle it, but it’s a very complicated thing. If you go too slow it’s bad, and if you ruin the economy everyone will starve. . . .”

Silly and naughty . With the breadth of the English language at his command, those were the two words Uys chose to describe the ingrained shame of apartheid. It may be just that attitude that makes it hard to feel completely comfortable with “The Gods Must Be Crazy.”

But why have these two films been so hysterically received? Critics, I suspect, glory in finding new talent; to a degree, they set themselves up to be seduced. “Blood Simple” is an American independent, already a plus in its favor. And when a film gets on a critical roll, it generates a momentum of its own. In the case of “The Gods,” its pixilated, Three Stooges surface (as well as the undeniable and irresistible charm of the Bushman N!Xau) may have tempted audiences not to look beneath a jokey surface at the message that’s really contained in that bottle.