Short Takes

CINEMA

Failing Marx

WRITER PAT PROFT ASPIRES TO MAKE SIlent-movie comedy. The first moments of BRAIN DONORS tell you this, with half-a-dozen quick, sprightly sight gags. The rest of Proft's script says the same thing: the talking isn't nearly so funny. Or perhaps it's the delivery. Proft, a longtime toiler in the Zucker brothers' Airplane! factory (The Naked Gun, Hot Shots!), has updated A Night at the Opera, this time with the anarchic philistinism demolishing a ballet company. But director Dennis Dugan's zanies -- John Turturro, Bob Nelson, Mel Smith -- can't enunciate, and their playing is way too broad; they must think the Marx brothers were Moe, Larry and Curly. Maybe farce always wears out its audience, but it shouldn't wear out its welcome. When Turturro tells some swells, "I bid you all a fond-ue," you may say, "Fond-ue to you too."

. TELEVISION

A Survivor's Tale

ANYONE WHO HAS SEEN THE PLAYER knows how screenwriters are usually treated in Hollywood: either they're laughed off or they're bumped off. PBS'S AMERICAN MASTERS series makes a case for respect this week with Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter's Journey, a lovely tribute to a Hollywood survivor. Salt had penned several successful films in the 1930s and '40s (The Shopworn Angel) when he was forced into exile by the blacklist. The script assignments eventually returned, but his talent didn't: his name first reappeared on dogs like Taras Bulba. But Salt made a comeback with his powerful screenplay for Midnight Cowboy, followed by Serpico and Coming Home. Nice work, nice guy.

MUSIC

Nabobs of Nihilism

LIKE A DEADBEAT WHO COMES TO THE party but refuses to have fun, Robert Smith, lead singer of the CURE, knows the seductive power of denial. Drifting over dirgelike beats and churning guitars, Smith's alienated lyrics and choked-up vocals have helped make the Cure the most accomplished and popular purveyors of British Mope Rock. On Wish, album No. 12, the band continues to fuse harmonic innovation with New Wave nihilism. Smith allows himself fleeting moments of optimism, and on one song actually uses the word happy. By the time the record closes with End, however, he has slipped back into a funk, realizing that "tired disguised oblivion is everything I do." Well, except for collecting those huge royalty checks.

BOOKS

House Calls

THE PLACE TO MURDER A WOMAN IS IN THE home. On the day after Christmas, when Isabelle Barney looked through the peephole of her front door, someone shot her in the eye. A considerate death: painless and not much damage to the door. In "I" IS FOR INNOCENT (Henry Holt; $18.95), her best-crafted alphabetical mystery yet, Sue Grafton sends p.i. Kinsey Millhone around the small city of Santa Teresa, Calif., as if her 1974 VW were the pencil in a follow-the-dots puzzle. Armed with matchless powers of observation ("I pictured . . . his nose pierced, a tiny ruby sitting on his nostril like a semiprecious booger") and a genius for the drudgery of detection, Kinsey follows a methodical trail to Isabelle's killer. Waiting in the dark, with her Heckler & Koch gun and her Winchester Silvertip bullets: that's a home where Kinsey calls the shots.

THEATER

Hollow Victory?

IF THE JAPANESE LOST WORLD WAR II, why are they able to buy real estate and corporations of the former Allies? Was victory hollow then? Given the atrocities, is justice being confounded now? Those familiar questions were posed anew but not answered in SHIMADA, an Australian hit that arrived on Broadway last week with a starry cast (Ben Gazzara, Ellen Burstyn, Estelle Parsons and Mako) and a gongs-and-samurai dreamscape production. The plot hinged on hints that a Japanese tycoon who bids on a clapped-out bicycle factory may also be the stockade guard who tortured its founder (as recalled in gruesome flashback). But that identity was never settled. The larger debate was too relentlessly evenhanded to change minds, and the show closed.