Top Secret! (1984)

★★★★
I've seen the ZAZ Team's Cold War comedy Top Secret! too many times to laugh as hard as I did when I saw it years ago. I've seen it over a dozen times now, yet I can still get a good chuckle out of it. Even when I know what the next gag is going to be, I chuckle in anticipation. This kind of reaction speaks to how strong the comedy is. This movie has among the highest of joke densities that I've ever seen. At a short 90 minutes, Top Secret! is multilayered and stuffed to the edges with puns, sight gags, absurd dialogue and double entendres. The title sequence sets the tone for the rest of the show, and it's the funniest title sequence I've ever seen (vastly superior to the title sequence for Monty Python and the Holy Grail). It's a music video-style presentation of a Beach Boys-inspired song sung by the movie's hero, and it features surfers shooting clay pigeons (skeet surfin') while all manner of silliness plays out on the beach (the sunbather who leaves two impressions in the sand is a highlight). At one point, a crowd of surfers runs toward the ocean. Look closely, and you'll spot the elderly couple and two children among the adults.

There is a temptation to give away too many jokes while reviewing a movie like this. I will tread carefully. The action takes place in East Germany. The leadership is plotting an attack on a NATO submarine fleet as it passes through the Straits of Gibraltar. For a distraction, East Germany is holding a cultural festival featuring artists from all over the world. Among them is Nick Rivers (Val Kilmer, in his first movie), a rock and roll star so huge he headlines events at Madison Square Garden while Frank Sinatra is relegated to "Time Permitting" status. His introduction to East Germany is rough: A smuggler is shot; the guard dogs tear open his package to reveal something that would only interest them. Once inside East Berlin, Nick attends a banquet, where he meets Hillary Flammond (Lucy Gutteridge), who is running from the police and will later be revealed to be a member of a resistance movement determined to stop the Germans.

Nick's fortunes change upon meeting Hillary. His manager dies with a big smile on his face thanks to the electrical currents used in Europe. The police detain him for helping Hillary and attacking an agent. We learn a little bit of Hillary's backstory, which is a hilarious retelling of The Blue Lagoon. Nick becomes further embroiled in the fight against the Germans when he meets the resistance, a collection of French personalities with names like Déjà Vu (Jim Carter) and Chocolate Mousse (Eddie Tagoe). Hillary's father Dr. Paul Flammond (Michael Gough) is a prisoner and is being forced to develop a new weapon, which will be used against the NATO fleet. Nick's trip, which started out as an opportunity to introduce rock and roll to this oppressed nation, has thrust him into the middle of a Cold War dispute. Up until now, this plot sounds very much like an entry in the spy thriller genre passed through a comedic lens, but in reality Top Secret! is a blending of two distinct genres: the spy thriller and rock musical. In addition to the opening skeet surfin' beach video, we get four singing performances by Nick in which he woos his audience with his amazing vocals and marvelous dance skills.

I wanted to start with the plot summary before going on to analyze the comedy to push back on the notion that this movie has no story. There is a story. I've just described it, and it makes sense, and there is resolution. There is a hero and a villain. The fact that the story is spaced out to allow for the insertion of its musical sequences and visual gags doesn't negate its existence. Roger Ebert's positive review, while welcome, dismisses the plot entirely ("This movie has no plot. It does not need a plot."). The most unfortunate critics of the story are the ZAZ Team members themselves. David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams were on a creative blitz during the decade. After their uneven compilation of skits (The Kentucky Fried Movie) introduced us to Feel-Around ("…our next full-length motion picture presentation: Deep Throat…"), they hit the ground running with their most recognizable work, 1980's Airplane!. Stuck in between that film and the Naked Gun series is Top Secret!, and the ZAZ team isn't overly fond of it, a position made clear on the D.V.D.'s audio commentary, and that's too bad. This is my favorite comedy. The story is good enough to take us from one location to another and conclude in a way that wraps up everything. That is all we need. The raison d'être is the humor, and the jokes here are some of ZAZ's most imaginative and best work, with individual scenes that are brilliant in concept and execution.

I can start with the Swedish book store sequence, which is a masterpiece of timing. It doesn't give itself away at first, but then it gleefully lets us in on the gag so we can appreciate the effort that went into it (kind of like Penn & Teller revealing how their tricks work). Nick and Hillary walk into the bookstore to meet a resistance member played by Peter Cushing (his face mold from this movie was later used in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story), and they walk up the aisle of books and have their conversation, which is supposedly in Swedish, until we realize the entire scene is played in reverse. (This setup plays with the notion that Swedish sounds like English played backward.) The other major elaborate scene is an underwater fight between Nick and the main bad guy. The actors were actually underwater and apparently weighed down to keep them from floating. This whole sequence is remarkable given how much of it is in view. It was filmed in a tank, and SCUBA divers were just off camera, but the cuts are long enough, and the lighting is just dark enough, to give the impression that they are deep underwater without assistance. I would love to see behind-the-scenes footage of how this was accomplished. This technical achievement is on top of why this Western-staged fight is funny in the first place. Kudos to the two stuntmen who jumped off a moving vehicle and into the river, falling at least 30 feet while holding on to each other and slowly turning to their bodies to enter nearly headfirst.

Every frame of this picture is packed with jokes in the foreground and background. A serious conversation can take place right in front of us while something is happening in the distance. There is no way to spot them all in one viewing. Even almost 40 years later, the vast majority of jokes hold up, and if the movie stumbles at all, it will have nothing to do with the execution and everything to do with younger audiences not understanding some of the references (Montgomery Ward, the Ford Pinto, etc.). These dated jokes are few enough that they don't disrupt the flow. The spy story is surprisingly fertile ground for humor, but the other half of the coin is the rock musical. Nick Rivers is modeled after Elvis Presley and even dances like the King. The script blends these two distinct genres effortlessly, with Nick moving from a resistance hideout in the countryside to a pizza restaurant where the patrons are dressed as if they were in a 1950s soda shop. Such a concoction might spell doom for a lesser movie, but for Top Secret it's a strength. If anyone wants to question the logic of American women's 1950s attire in 1984 East Germany, where French freedom fighters (modeled after anti-Vichy France resistance cells) are in operation, then I would remind such a viewer that near the beginning, legendary actor Omar Sharif is crushed inside a car at the junkyard; not only does he live, but he walks around in the compacted cube.

I could go on. An impromptu dance featuring Nick and Hillary was so good it inspired a similar scene in the ZAZ Team's The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear. There's a sneaky dig at L. Ron Hubbard that I love. There's a great visual gag featuring binoculars and a herd of cows, and the cow featured on the movie's posters makes her appearance in a bizarre plan to rescue Dr. Flammond. Top Secret! is uproariously funny. It's my go-to in conversations about funny movies. The jokes are plentiful. The dialogue is hilarious (there's a priest who recites random Latin phrases). Despite acting in his first movie, Val Kilmer confidently leads the cast and absolutely nails every joke that he dishes out and receives. He understood exactly how his performance should look. He's largely indifferent to the mischief around him, as if in this world it's perfectly normal to prefer torture over an extra year of school. His biggest contribution is his singing, which is magnificent. He carries himself like Elvis Presley and has the speech and mannerism down perfectly. He demonstrates his grasp of the King when he sings a tune he wrote for a Macy's commercial even though the melody is recognizable as "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" His performance here was an audition of sorts for Oliver Stone's The Doors, in which he gave a hauntingly accurate portrayal of Jim Morrison.

The ZAZ team was largely split up by the time of The Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult in 1994. The members have had varying degrees of success since. Abrahams made the Hot Shots! movies, while Jerry and David went their separate ways to make Ghost, Rat Race (both by Jerry), the surprisingly good Scary Movie 3 and the shockingly bad Scary Movie 4 (both by David). Top Secret! represents ZAZ at its peak, even if the team members don't agree. Does Airplane! have a better story? It's arguable whether it does or not, but Top Secret! has a far higher quantity of jokes, and the movie delivers them at such a high rate that just a few weeks before I wrote these words, someone pointed out a reference to "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" during the opening beach scene, which I never noticed. It says a lot that these subtle throw-away gags can go undetected for so long. I can laugh plenty during recent hits like The Other Guys and This is 40 (a masterpiece of comedy in its own way), but I prefer the cheerfully insane antics of Top Secret!.

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