Rushes

BEST DEFENSE

The East is the Middle East, where Lieut. Eddie Murphy is demonstrating a dubiously designed tank to dubiously inclined Arab buyers. The West is California, two years earlier, where Dudley Moore plays an engineer who gets into trouble by failing to give his undivided attention to making Eddie's lemon grow. And, yes, never the twain shall meet. But the poet's point is a poor comic premise. Though Best Defense provides both stars a few funny moments and offers some promising satirical ideas, its binary construction imposes a fatal jumpiness on it. Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, who co-wrote American Graffiti and Indiana Jones, have proved they can do better. Huyck, the director here, will have to prove on some other occasion that he has a gift for being funny on film as well as on the page.

PRIVATES ON PARADE

As performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1977, Peter Nichols' musical play was a daft and bitter satire on Britain's declining imperial fortunes. A troupe of conscripted music-hall artists bumble and camp their way through post-World War II Singapore, drawing flak from their stiff-upper-twit major and sniper fire from local guerrillas. Alternating farcical skits with wicked song parodies, Privates was a near perfect stage piece, and thus an unsuitable candidate for filming. Some of the songs are gone; the plot is attenuated and detoxified; and Director Michael Blakemore (who also staged the R.S.C. production) has encouraged Monty Python Alumnus John Cleese to exaggerate the role of the befuddled major into a cacophony of whinnies, grimaces and silly walks. Before being drafted for their latest tour, Nichols' Privates should have gone AWOL.

ELECTRIC DREAMS

Boy meets girl. Boy loves girl. Boy loses girl to his home computer. And the electronic age gets its very own romantic comedy. Miles (Lenny Von Dohlen) is a nebbishy architect with a pretty cellist (Virginia Madsen) living upstairs. One day Miles' computer, Edgar, hears Madeline playing. It is love at first byte. The machine composes a romantic duet, the two "neighbors" make beautiful music together, and Madeline assumes Miles is the tune's author. This is a gently schizophrenic movie: Rusty Lemorande's script is as mild as Miles; the direction, by MTV Whiz Steve Barren (Billie Jean), often percolates as busily as Edgar in high dudgeon. Still, Von Dohlen is a find, with easy, exquisite comic timing; and Edgar, the cybernetic Cyrano, is the most endearingly neurotic bundle of software since HAL 9000.