Watching Top Secret! For the First Time

One of the most popular movie suggestions people have for me when they hear I’m writing this column is Airplane!, and I can’t blame them for suggesting it. Airplane! is just like a lot of the movies I didn’t see as I kid — it’s racy, low-brow, full of double entendres, only rated PG because PG-13 hadn’t been invented yet — exactly the kind of movie that I wasn’t allowed to watch. I actually have seen it, though, but I remember it being right on the edge of what my tiny sheltered brain could understand as a child. I particularly remember being scarred for life by that scene where a woman vomits an egg with a live bird inside.

I just wasn’t ready, I guess. A kid who’s only allowed G- and PG-rated family films growing up is bound to be freaked out by all sorts of things in movies, which is why the steamroller scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The dead Joker scene in Batman, numerous moments in James Bond and Indiana Jones movies, and countless other minute instances of violence, suspense and weirdness in films gave me nightmares for years to come every time I was unfortunate to run across one while channel surfing or at a friend’s house. I wouldn’t exchange my childhood for anything, but I was a fragile little guy.

But I digress. I’ve seen Airplane!, a number of times, and it’s great. Ditto the Hot Shots! and The Naked Gun series. For a guy who hasn’t seen anything, I’m pretty familiar with the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker franchise. But until this week, I’d never seen Top Secret!

It’s a good one to have saved. Anyone who’s seen a ZAZ movie knows what to expect, but while it isn’t as consistently silly as Airplane! or The Naked Gun, I’d say in many ways, it’s better. There are fewer jokes, sure, but there’s also more going on, and the material here is among the stronger, weirder and more ambitious that those guys have attempted. Which, 30 years later, does a lot to make a movie still worth watching.

Top Secret!, released in 1980, is like an insane Elvis movie set in an anachronistic East Germany. Nick Rivers (Val Kilmer) is a ‘50s-esque rock singer who travels to East Germany for a concert but gets involved in a resistance movement and a romantic entanglement with a beautiful rebel, Hillary Flammond (Lucy Gutteridge). The setting allows for a ton of Nazi, GDR, Elvis, Beach Boys and Beatles jokes, with a couple Jimmy Carter and Ford Pinto gags thrown in.

Speaking of jokes, you gotta hand it to those ZAZ guys — they do what few comedians dare to do today with gags: plant a fertile field and cash in until every last bit has been exhausted. Rebel base gunfight scene? Great. Every possible gun/window/shootout joke in 3 minutes. Val Kilmer sings a song about rugs for some reason? No problem, there are 48 rugs in this diner. But somehow it mostly works, and two of the more elaborate set pieces — one in which an underwater fistfight becomes a full-fledged Western bar brawl, complete with bar, bartender, breaking bottles and frightened poker players, all underwater, and another entire scene which is a long take filmed in reverse — are truly impressive ways to take a dumb joke and run it out. It’s actually a little sad that those two scenes are not more well-known as iconic physical comedy bits (unless they are and nobody told me). I could see those scenes being played in film classes right alongside Donald O’Connor in the scene shop or Harpo and Groucho doing the mirror scene. And all from the same guys who wrote that terrible beaver joke, no less! Who knew?

There are also a good handful of, for lack of a better adjective, quieter jokes. Not subtle or smart necessarily, but jokes that aren’t as broad as you might expect — jokes that go un-punchlined. The fact that the guys in the cow suit are played by an actual cow, for instance, with shitty spots painted on and rain boots on all four feet. It’s dumb, sure, but it’s not a punchline to anything — they just show it and never talk about it. Kilmer looking out of a train to see a man running to catch a tree is another good example. They’re the kind of gags that value strange and goofy over easy and broad, and although the difference may be small, it’s significant. ZAZ excels at both kinds, but when there are a good number of the latter, as there are in Top Secret!, it’s really satisfying.

I’ve seen him do better, but Val Kilmer isn’t bad in this. It’s a good role for him, and the fact that he can actually sing and dance is nice, even if they do exploit that a little too often. He’s not given much real comedy to do, but he handles what he’s given, and more importantly, he plays a reasonably sane, likable guy in a batshit world. He’s something to hold on to, which a movie like this really needs. His chemistry with Gutteridge isn’t bad, either, and their love story is about as sweet as you could expect a story that dumb to be.

In many ways, Top Secret! is a lot like The Producers. Both are made by guys who have made a career out of rapid-fire jokes of mind-numbing stupidity, deployed properly and in ridiculous numbers, but both films are, for better and for worse, the most plot- and character-driven films of their families. Both films suffer a little by having fewer jokes than their siblings and a level of silly that often doesn’t mesh with the level of story, but what they lose in jokes they make up for in characters that actually interact with each other, and a story that is, against all odds, sort of worth investing in. Or at least substantial enough to be called a story.

Top Secret! totally holds up, certainly as well as Airplane!, and although I haven’t seen Hot Shots! recently, I’d bet Top Secret! has aged better. I’m also glad I waited until adulthood to see it, because I think I’m just now brave enough to see that scene where Peter Cushing’s eye is really big and not pee myself with horror.

Alden Ford is an actor, writer and comedian living in Brooklyn. He performs regularly in NYC with his sketch/improv group Sidecar.

Watching Top Secret! For the First Time