Review of The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988) by Edith N — 21 Jul 2012

Hey! It's Enrico Palazzo!

One of the things which has always amused me about this movie is that the characters with single lines get credited as the person who said that line, which is the only way anyone remembers any of them anyway. They also amused themselves by following "Thug #1" in the credits with "Thug #27," knowing that it doesn't really matter what number they stick after their names. I remember noticing the thing about the lines, at least, when I saw this in the theatre all those years ago. (Strangely, this was a holiday release. Can you imagine seeing this on Christmas?) I was also more amused than it really merited that they followed the romance montage with the little label implying that it was a music video from its own soundtrack, largely because I'd seen the actual music video from the soundtrack so many times in the weeks leading up to that. After all, I watched a lot of VH1 as a kid, and that was at the time just the kind of station which would be inclined toward playing a music video for Herman's Hermits.

Nordberg (O.J. Simpson) has been found floating in the water down at the docks, and there's an implication that he was caught up in heroine smuggling. His partner, Lieutenant Frank Drebbin (Leslie Nielsen), is just back from beating up a bunch of anti-American world leaders in Beirut, and he's found this out. Also that his girlfriend has left him for another man. He decides that he's going to go after whoever set Nordberg up. This turns out to be Vincent Ludwig, because he's played by Ricardo Montalban and therefore obviously the villain. Ludwig's secretary, Jane Spencer (Priscilla Presley), is sent to make nice to Frank and get him out of Ludwig's way, and she finds herself really falling for him. However, after Frank burns Ludwig's apartment and otherwise creates chaos, he is taken off the job. Which, in this particular instance, is protecting Queen Elizabeth II (Jeannette Charles) on her trip to Los Angeles. It turns out Ludwig has a secret plan to kill her using mind control, because why not?

Because of how very little I care about football, I must admit that my first question when O.J. Simpson was first accused of murder was how they would make any potential further sequels to this. Sad but true. I knew that, convicted or not, they were not going to have him in the series anymore, and I didn't blame them even a little. Innocent until proven guilty is all well and good, but there's something a little silly about having a good, wholesome police detective played by someone whose innocence was proven in court but not believed by a substantial percentage of the population. (Yes, including me.) Oh, it turned out not to matter, because they just didn't make anymore, but I can't help wondering how much the whole murder of his wife influenced that particular decision. Probably not much, but I'm willing to bet that various of the people involved in the films had the same thought as I did. Even today, it's hard to watch his character's loving relationship with Mrs. Nordberg (Susan Beaubian). Knowing what we do about how he treated that wife doesn't help, either.

For many years, I thought this was my first exposure to Leslie Nielsen. Like many of my generation, I didn't realize that he had once been a serious actor. I had not, at that point, seen any of his serious films; I still haven't seen most of them. (I'm looking forward to the one where he plays Custer!) I might have seen [i]Airplane![/i] by the time this came out, but only on cable, and I don't think Mom likes it much. She would have known that he was once a serious actor, but I did not put together the fact that I, too, had seen him in a dramatic role once. In my childhood, in those long-ago days when the Disney Channel used to play things out of the vault on a regular basis, they aired a [i]Wonderful World of Disney[/i] series wherein Leslie Nielsen played Colonel Francis Marion, the Revolutionary War officer known as the Swamp Fox. I loved it madly as a kid, and the only reason I don't own it now is that the DVD release isn't very good. (It's only a few episodes, not the whole series.) But it took until I was in college before I realized it was him.

The movie? Oh, it's silly. Mindless. The plot doesn't make any sense, in so much as there really is a plot. And honestly, it may well be that the reason the [i]Police Squad![/i] TV show failed was that there is definitely such thing as too much of this character. It only works at all because he's so deadpan about it, of course, and that's the reason it was so important to cast a dramatic actor in these sorts of movies. Heck, George Kennedy got cast largely because the studio, for some reason, insisted on having an Oscar winner in it. (No, I don't know why, either.) He had regretted missing out mocking himself in [i]Airplane![/i] Which, you know, fair enough. But I own [i]Airplane![/i] and watch it on a regular basis, and I have no interest in owning this. I wouldn't turn it down as a gift, but I can think of literally dozens of movies I'd buy before getting around to this one. Still, for a summer evening, it's not that bad a choice. I had assumed that was how I saw it in the first place, but given that I did see it in the theatre, I guess not.