The season is out of joint. This is the time of year when distributors usually get rid of all of those movies they don't think are worth releasing in the prime moviegoing times of Christmas and the midsummer months. Yet there have been more new films of interest in the last few weeks than I can remember in any comparable period in a number of years.
One of the latest of these is ''Tender Mercies,'' a funny, most appealing and most sharply observed film that's set in rural Texas and concerns, among other things, people who sing ''Jesus Saves,'' without making fun of them. Based on an original screenplay by Horton Foote, who received an Oscar for his adaptation of ''To Kill a Mockingbird,'' and directed by Bruce Beresford, the Australian director (''Breaker Morant'') in his American debut, ''Tender Mercies'' is likely to become the year's most unexpected hit, sometimes called ''a sleeper,'' which has always seemed to me to be a phrase that contradicted itself.
If any other actor except Robert Duvall were playing the leading role in ''Tender Mercies,'' that of a down-and-out country-and-Western singer, you'd probably call this the performance of his career. But Mr. Duvall has contributed so many brilliant performances to such films as ''True Confessions,'' ''Apocalypse Now,'' ''The Great Santini'' and ''The Seven Percent Solution'' that it doesn't do justice to him to suggest that ''Tender Mercies'' is somehow better. It's great and different. It's also the performance of an extraordinary American actor in the midst of an exceptional career.
In all respects ''Tender Mercies'' is so good that it has the effect of rediscovering a kind of film fiction that has been debased over the decades by hack moviemakers, working according to accepted formulas, frequently to the applause of the critics as well as the public.
''Tender Mercies'' is a warm film, by which I mean something very different from sentimental. The good ''warm'' film, as opposed to the good ''cool'' film, never leaves one in any doubt as to what it's about or how one is supposed to respond to it. Its surprises come not through any breakthroughs in style, or from shock, or from disorienting juxtapositions of content that force one to reexamine one's relations with the universe.
Instead, like ''Tender Mercies,'' it works through conventional means to find the special that we always hope exists within the ordinary.
If it isn't still too soon to attempt to identify the most important film development in the 1970's, I'd say it was the emergence of a kind of cool - commercial movies can't support a fancy term like Modernist - film that owes more than a frame or two to the radically new-looking films made by Jean-Luc Godard in the late 1950's and 60's. These films, as well as the cool films that came after, especially those of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, insist that audiences make choices while looking at the films.
They often don't mean exactly what they say. They favor medium long-shots that allow the audience to choose where to look. A closeup may be used more for decoration than to italicize a point. The people on the screen - sometimes they can't even be described as characters - are not to be identified with but, instead, to be scrutinized and considered, as if they were previously unknown fauna.
In its extreme form, as in Fassbinder's classic, ''In a Year of 13 Moons,'' the cool film may be beautiful to look at but resolutely off-putting as it demands that we pay attention to things most of us would prefer to ignore. The cool film initially makes us uneasy, though ultimately it may be far more involving than the more ordinary warm film because we've had to contribute to it. The warm film soothes.
Though Godard and Fassbinder films have never been wildly successful in the mass American market, an increasing number of films that do reach this market show the influences of these cool moviemakers. Martin Scorsese's best films - ''Taxi Driver,'' ''Raging Bull'' and ''The King of Comedy'' - do not go gently into one's memory. They are entertaining but they also disturb us by forcing us to consider people and situations that undermine our feelings of self-assurance and well-being.
Though ''Betrayal'' is extremely moving, it also is a cool film. It keeps its three characters at an equal distance from us so that no one character has a distinct emotional advantage over the other two.
Two typical examples of warm films are Richard Attenborough's ''Gandhi,'' a wholehearted endorsement of a man whose saintliness is never in doubt, and ''The Night of the Shooting Stars,'' by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, a movie that sides with the angels, with heroic ''little'' people, but so unequivocally that it seems a tiny bit smug. The principal thing the audience discovers in a film like this is its own - not the characters' - worthiness. The filmmakers have done all of the work and labeled every character so clearly that all we have to do is nod in approval.
''Tender Mercies'' is an equally warm film but you know that, like its hero, Mac Sledge (Mr. Duvall), it is aware of the bottomless pit that awaits those who lose their bearings in life. ''Tender Mercies'' is full of surprises, the major one being that a film that so unembarrassedly and unashamedly endorses the so-called oldfashioned values could be both moving and provocative.
Mr. Foote and Mr. Beresford achieve a kind of tender heroism, something missing from ''The Night of the Shooting Stars,'' in two ways. They dramatize the depths of their characters' feelings so successfully that we share them, and they allow us to understand just how fragile are the lives we are watching. It's only by seeing this fragility that we have any idea of their true strength.
When first seen, Mac Sledge is a boozing has-been, a once-famous country-and-Western singer and songwriter, drifting through rural Texas doing odd jobs for room, board and bottle. One day he comes upon the isolated motel and service station run by Rosa Lee (Tess Harper), a pretty Vietnam widow who is 15 years younger than Mac and has a 9-year-old son, nicknamed Sonny (Allan Hubbard). Unlike the writing in most warm films, Mr. Foote's screenplay - the best thing he's ever done for films - doesn't overexplain or overanalyze. It has a rare appreciation for understatement, which is the style of its characters if not of the actual narrative.
After a week or two working for Rosa Lee, Mac starts drinking less and less and, after two months, he's off the sauce entirely, at which point he proposes. They are working side by side in the garden, hoeing. ''Would you think about marrying me?'' says Mac. ''Yes,'' says Rosa Lee, ''I will.'' That is that and they return to their work.
For much of the film we're never quite sure how lasting Mac's cure will be. Only gradually do we realize that it's the result of his love for Rosa Lee and Sonny, combined with the physical and emotional exhaustion that have accumulated over the years. Mac never has to say anything to that effect. It's apparent in every line and in every gesture, big and small.
Although understatement is the style of the characters, ''Tender Mercies'' is packed with dramatic incidents, sometimes bordering on melodrama, which involve not only Mac's relations with Rosa Lee and Sonny but also with his ex-wife Dixie (Betty Buckley), who is still a star on the country-and-Western circuit, and their pretty, troubled, teen-age daughter, Sue Anne (Ellen Barkin). More about what happens is unimportant to spell out, except to emphasize that it's never predictable.
Mr. Beresford's ''Breaker Morant'' was a good, solid film based, I'm told, on a good, solid play. I suspect that the success of ''Tender Mercies'' has less to do with any similarities between Australia's outback and rural Texas than with the director's secure sense of what he wants to see on the screen and his ability to put it there. Beginning with Mr. Duvall, the film is perfectly cast, not with types but with superior actors.
Tess Harper, a Texas actress who makes her film debut as Rosa Lee, will be one of this year's discoveries. A young woman with an oddly asymmetrical blonde beauty, she has the kind of concentration one usually associates with actors who've had long stage experience. However, since young Allan Hubbard, who plays her son and who has never acted professionally before, shares that concentration, I suspect it must be the work of Mr. Beresford.
Almost as fine are Ellen Barkin, as Mac's spoiled, doomed daughter, and Betty Buckley, who is currently in Broadway's ''Cats,'' as Mac's ex-wife, a tough, determined, savvy, show-biz type.
The film's beautiful physical ''look'' - lots of long, low, flat horizons under great expanses of cloudless blue sky - is as idealized as the sentiments expressed in the country-and-Western music on the soundtrack, which also gives the film its lilting pace. Good films as genuinely warm and sweet as ''Tender Mercies'' are rare. I don't want to oversell it, but if an essentally nonmusical movie can be called a toe-tapper, ''Tender Mercies'' is it.