| MH Rowe |
Top Secret! plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, September 5th, through Sunday, September 7th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
If you’re going to do something really stupid, it’s not a bad idea to be beautiful. Maybe that’s how Val Kilmer ended up in Top Secret! (1984), which is both his film debut and a spoof of spy stories, resistance thrillers, and, for some reason, Elvis Presley. Top Secret! is, I hasten to add, the second spoof with an exclamation point in the title made by Jim Abrahams and his creative partners, brothers David and Jerry Zucker, after their cult classic Airplane! (1980). They would later conclude their exclamation point trilogy with the similarly cultic The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988), starring the immortal Leslie Nielsen. Of the trilogy—surely planned over the course of a long apprenticeship in the sacred arts of pun, gag, and slapstick—Top Secret falls far short of the reputation of its predecessor and successor. Like a middle child, it wants all the attention but doesn’t really know what to do with it.
Not that the film is lacking in dummy exuberance. There’s something aimless and decadent, even indulgent about Top Secret!, much more so than you could say about Airplane or Naked Gun. Where those two movies cram as many gags as possible into parodies that depend on extremely sober-seeming actors (Nielsen, Peter Graves, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges) saying ridiculous things and comic turns from famous black athletes (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, O.J. Simpson), Top Secret has Kilmer repeatedly doing Elvis Presley dance routines that must have been dated even at the time, though he certainly nails the moves. There’s no real toying with gravitas in Top Secret. Yes, Omar Sharif is here, getting sprayed in the face with ink, yet the filmmakers don’t really make use of him. A serious actor should be marshaled like a precious resource when it comes to this kind of material. Top Secret makes Airplane seem tight and focused by comparison.
If you can’t feel a flash of delight at the scene in which Hillary Flammond (Lucy Gutteridge) looks down from a balcony at the busy street below, and it’s just toy cars and live hamsters on a painted road between model buildings, well, you’ll be fine medically speaking, but don’t you want to live deliciously? What strikes me as odd about the gag is its artisanal purity. Sure, old movies rely on models to mock-up vistas of this or that sort. But here the scene implies the lunatic, I-can’t-believe-I-get-paid-for-this labor of the art department that manufactured a modest habitat for a shot that lasts less than ten seconds. It’s an art-project joke that conveys the excitement of getting the chance to stick anything you want in front of a camera. And choosing to be, of all things, sort of homespun.
More genuinely puzzling is when Gutteridge and Kilmer visit a contact in their fight against East German Nazi analogues at a shop that peddles rare Swedish books. I guess in the same spirit as the nonsensical hurdy-durdy language of the “Swedish Chef” character in Jim Henson’s Muppets, the scene was shot backwards to get bizarre, reverse dialogue. It scans David Lynch. While the audio sounds goofy, the choreography’s rather impressive. Like the hamster scene, this shot-backwards but played-forwards sequence conveys the crafty time and play that went into filming it. If only the bit made you laugh.
Maybe not much funnier but nevertheless more effective is the film’s underwater fight scene. Best example, I think, of this surely tiny sub-genre. The spirit of Buster Keaton is alive and well as Kilmer and his opponent, filmed in 15-second intervals, punch each other while holding their breath. The fact that Abrahams and the Zucker brothers decided to make the underwater set an Old West saloon only emphasizes the appealing possibility of an entire western shot on the bottom of a pool. Again, it’s a bit more bravura than you have any right to expect from a film like this.
Still, you can’t make something of everything, though Val Kilmer gives it a shot. Of his first three films, two have the word Top in the title. Top Secret is the first movie of his I’ve watched since his death, and the fact that it’s his debut lends the whole thing an inescapable melancholy. It’s that hamster scene all over again. A human being labored over this preposterous choreography. People sat down and sketched it all out. They planned, they revised, then they put in Val Kilmer as the exclamation point. He always seemed like he was having fun.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon