THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD!
With Leslie Nielsen, George Kennedy, Priscilla Presley, Ricardo Montalban, O.J. Simpson, and Nancy Marchand.
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In 1982, the ZAZ team created an ill-fated TV series, Police Squad!, which I haven’t seen and which was taken off the air after four episodes. (Elements from this show, including its lead actor Leslie Nielsen, were later recycled in The Naked Gun.) Then came Top Secret!, which complicated the approach of Airplane! by anachronistically merging two dissimilar and outdated movie formulas–the Elvis Presley rock musical and the World War II epic–and adding elements from cold war thrillers like Torn Curtain for good measure. This second feature also mined a vein of visual and verbal non sequiturs that bore no particular relation to either of the lampooned genres (for example, a painting of a landscape seen from a moving train was rendered as a blur). This vein, which already existed embryonically in Airplane!, developed into a zone of surreal whimsy and sheer weirdness that was often indulged in simply for its own sake.
Some of the funniest conceits in Top Secret! are in effect combinations of familiar movie conventions with weird, off-kilter variations. A phone looming gigantically in the foreground of one shot proves to be in fact a giant phone (rather than a visual trick of perspective) when a character approaches the camera to answer it; the offscreen sound of a German song over a shot of a horse-drawn carriage turns out to be coming from the horse; in the midst of a German torture session, one hears the following exchange: “Do you want me to bring out the Leroy Neiman paintings?” “No. We cannot risk violating the Geneva Convention.” Unfortunately, Top Secret!, which is more daring and adventuresome than Airplane, proved to be much less successful at the box office. (The relative absence of familiar, old-time Hollywood faces in the cast, apart from Omar Sharif and Peter Cushing, probably contributed to the audience’s disorientation.)
The fact that Nielsen is 62, George Kennedy (who plays the police captain) is 63, and Montalban is 68 contributes to their inadequacy as “serious” male leads, but not in ways that I find invariably funny. (For cruel humor, I much prefer Nielsen and Presley’s joint admission that they both practice safe sex, followed by a shot of them groping at one another in full-size body condoms.) My favorite moment occurs at the climactic baseball game–a very funny sequence, most of which has nothing to do with bad cop movies–when Nielsen executes a manic two-step on the field worthy of some of the better spastic choreography of Jerry Lewis; it’s a pure flight of fancy that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, executed with elation.
