Review of Top Secret! (1984) by Alex B — 02 Nov 2010

Here's a movie so abjectly campy and poorly made that enjoying it is like watching a performance while someone next to you obnoxiously chews gum the whole time. It is so obviously shot on studio sets. Actors are so obviously wearing make up. During the hilarious German magic salesman bit, whatever the German sprays in the spy's face makes the spy's make-up smear more and more. I can't quite figure out if Val Kilmer is just all-around wooden or if the Zuckers just don't tend to use his better takes. The musical sequences are truly boring, except for the rug sequence which is pretty cool. What it ends up boiling down to is an unending stream of puns and coarse visual gags one must wade through hopeless production values to take pleasure in.

Regardless, if one can, there is one sequence that's such a unique example of expressly cinematic humor that I'm surprised to find it here rather than an early Woody Allen comedy. The hero visits a Swedish bookshop. The scene relies not on why, but on English played in reverse, which sounds Scandinavian. The entire scene does this, with English subtitles. This is funny enough at the outset, before we even get it, but it becomes exceptional at the end of the scene, when it finally gives itself away. This is a level of filmic wit so far beyond comparison the surrounding movie that it's almost a contradiction splattered in the middle of it.

Nevertheless, like a Mel Brooks film, this movie will readily go for a laugh wherever one is even distantly liable to be found. It has political jokes and boob jokes, dog poop gags, and ballet jokes. It teases two utterly divergent Hollywood genres: the spy thriller and the Elvis Presley musical. It concerns an expatriate who escaped America by balloon during the Carter administration, an associate of the French underground named Escargot, and Omar Sharif contained in a flattened automobile.

Unlike Airplane!, which devoted itself to sending up one, very easily identifiable kind of popular film and which was performed by a large cast of recognizables whose careers were secured by such films, Top Secret! is based on no directly familiar forebear. It's by and large a lampoon of East-West espionage movies, as they might have been fashioned to go with a star like Elvis Presley or Frankie Avalon, something that no East-West espionage film ever remotely came close to doing. But now that I think about a lot of the shameless WWII propaganda using A-list dramatic talent, why not go all the way and put Paul Anka and Fabian on the frontlines with the dirty Japs and crouts? The foreseeably threadbare story in Top Secret! has something to do with an East German plot to bring Germany back together, ostensibly by containing the United States fleet just inside the Strait of Gibraltar. There's also something about a secret weapon and, more important, a huge cultural festival in East Germany designed to distract the attention of the Western powers from events in the Mediterranean. This really is a funny idea, too. I mean, can you imagine the Joint Chiefs being so concerned with whether or not Leonard Bernstein shows at a cultural festival that they would neglect to look at their daily intelligence reports?