“I know a little German. He’s sitting over there.”
There is no film with a denser joke per second ratio than Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker’s (ZAZ) 1984 comedic masterpiece, Top Secret!. The follow-up to their 1980 spoof hit, Airplane! (or Flying High as it was initially released in Australia), Top Secret! is more ambitious, far sillier, and formed with a defter creative hand than its predecessor. Director Jerry Zucker called it less of a movie and more a joke book, and that may be true if joke books could be loaded with perspective gags, Beach Boys parodies, and jokes in between the pages. There’s not a moment of stillness or seriousness, if there’s exposition in the foreground, you can bet something ridiculous is happening in the background.
Where Airplane! took on the disaster movie as the host of its insanity, for their second directorial feature, ZAZ elected multiple genres to lampoon. The most obvious is fifties spy thrillers, but the trio also skewer Elvis Presley’s musicals of the same decade such as Blue Hawaii. Therefore, the protagonist of the film would have to fit somewhere in the archetype established in those kinds of films. But why not Elvis as a spy? Enter Val Kilmer. Before he was Batman, Iceman, Doc Holliday or Chris Shiherlis; Val Kilmer – in his very first film – was Nick Rivers, an Elvis-style rock-n-roller who goes behind the iron curtain and falls into a dangerous world of giant telephones, Looney Tunes-style giant magnets, and giant-eyed Swedish bookshop owners. Kilmer, like with every role in his career, nails the exact performance the film requires. Both Kilmer’s Nick Rivers and Leslie Nielsen’s Doctor Rumack in Airplane! play the comedic moments totally straight. And they’re both excellent at it.
The film opens with a great slapstick fistfight fight atop a train barrelling through East Germany. A heroic spy dressed in the typical beige trench coat and a German soldier are trading blows. And who is this spy? Legendary actor Omar Sharif. Who gladly makes an absolute fool of himself in each small scene he’s in, including waddling around in a compacted car, and reaching down to return a “phony” dog poo to a novelties salesman. He looks like he’s having an absolute blast.
After Sharif’s narrow escape from a very Nazi-looking East German we cut to a very Nazi-looking East German command station. Like many things in the movie the precise era makes little sense. A fifties style rocker, goes to sixties style East Germany, where he fights WWII era Nazis with the French Underground, all in the shadow of eighties style politics.
In the command station the villains are plotting their villainous scheme involving a cultural festival as a distraction to the real villainous plan. Performers are set to arrive from all over the world, but the Americans have had to change their representative after Leonard Bernstein cancelled. Fortunately, there is a replacement, and his latest recording is lowered onto a record player. The needle drops and the room falls to silence as Nick Rivers’ latest hit, “Skeet Surfin’” crackles through the speakers.
In typical style for a ZAZ spoof, “Skeet Surfin’” and the several other parodies sung by Kilmer himself through the movie are impeccable. The genuinely well-crafted songs with ridiculous lyrics make it obvious why Weird Al Yankovic calls this his favourite movie. If nothing else, I implore you, watch the opening credits on YouTube. I guarantee you’ll find a laugh somewhere in those three minutes.
There’s something for anyone to laugh at here. Crass jokes, sight gags, child-like sex jokes, double-entendres and puns, slapstick, and the downright nonsensical. That phrasing, ‘child-like’ and not childish is an important distinction. There’s an innocence to it all that feels like a bunch of friends playing around and seeing who can come up with the most ridiculous idea to make the others laugh. Even the most hardened among you who believe yourselves far above such silliness will struggle to hold it together. The density of the jokes is certainly a component in the hilarity. If a gag doesn’t exactly tickle you there’s a good chance one in the next few seconds, within a minute at most, will. So intense is the rapid firing of jokes, you scarcely have time to take a breath to laugh more. And you’re sure to miss something, but that’s okay, all the more reason to watch this masterpiece again.
The spoof movie has, in recent years, vanished. Though it may be more accurate to say it was murdered by the ‘spoofs’ of the early 2000’s – Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer’s movies are all horrendous and effectively killed the genre. The ZAZ movies of the eighties have a few elements more recent endeavours lack. Primarily, there is an obvious love for the source of the spoof. Neither Airplane!, Top Secret!, nor, The Naked Gun would be successful, let alone have any semblance of plot, without the dramas that came before. Although these are spoofs, they aren’t making fun of the movies they mock, nor do they cynically mine them for cheap reference humour. Little in Top Secret! has aged poorly since its premiere over forty years ago. It’s a truly timeless humour that few have been able to tap into; the films of Mel Brooks and the Monty Python gang come to mind as other examples. If you enjoyed those early twenty first century spoofs, I recommend you to perhaps let them live in your memory.
More than any other movie, simply describing Top Secret! does it no justice. Like Lawrence of Arabia, it must be watched to truly be appreciated. If you’re ever feeling down, or melancholic, for any reason whatsoever, there’s really no better place to go than into an insane world of a ZAZ movie. A world where cows have perfectly round spots; members of the French resistance (in East Germany in the 80’s) are named Déjà vu, Chocolate Mousse and Latrine; and Nick Rivers, with that inimitable Val Kilmer smile, can set loose a bunch of parked motorcycles as if they were horses, get into an underwater barroom brawl and save the world.
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