Top Secret!

The comedy trio of brothers David and Jerry Zucker and their pal Jim Abrahams, collectively known first as The Kentucky Fried Theater Company and later simply as ZAZ, followed up their outrageously funny, independently produced, John Landis-directed 1977 anthology sketch picture The Kentucky Fried Movie with a picture that forever changed the face of movie comedies. 1982's Airplane! was no more the first spoof movie than '84's This Is Spinal Tap was the first mockumentary, but both films established their respective genres by crystallizing them into something distinctly different from traditional satire. Before Airplane!, Mel Brooks had been the primary producer of feature films that riffed on cinematic styles the way TV comedy/variety shows did for five-minute sketches that spoofed specific pictures, but he could mine laughs for a full 90 minutes. Brooks' Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, and History of the World, Part I lampooned specific genres and directors to varying degrees of success. Airplane! took this concept to a whole new place, sending up the decade-long Disaster Movie trend that was kicked off by the box-office champ Airport in 1970 by essentially doing a shot-for-shot remake of an earlier entry in the genre, 1957's Zero Hour! Rather than casting comedians or broadly comic actors to play the characters, the ZAZ team got far bigger laughs by placing serious dramatic movie stars in the main roles in Airplane! and directing them to play the parts with deadpan earnestness. It was inspired, and just as there has never been a mockumentary as good as Spinal Tap, there has never been a better spoof movie than Airplane!

Still, the second feature from the ZAZ team might still be my favorite entry in their canon. Far less universal than Airplane! or their last hit film together, The Naked Gun, Top Secret! is full of humor that probably appeals more to serious movie buffs than general audiences. A mash-up of WWII spy movies and Elvis Presley Rock 'n' Roll musicals, Top Secret! is an odd entry in a genre that's meant to trigger instant recognition in the broadest possible audience, playing on tropes so universal that one need only see four or five movies a year to get most of the jokes. The film also features some of the most surrealistic and out-of-left-field site gags in any of the ZAZ pictures. I personally find these gags to be some of the most inspired stuff in any of their pictures. But while every audience will laugh at the scene in Airplane! in which a farewell between two lovers is staged as if they are parting at a train station, with one waving from the open door of the plane as it taxis away and the other running after him along the runway extending the goodbye beyond all feasibility, it's not as clear what's funny about a shot from inside a train car as it pulls away only to reveal that it's not the train that's moving, but the station. That optical illusion sight gag mocks a stock shot found in any movie genre with a character departing on a train. While I might find it the funniest and most unexpected joke imaginable, others might go, "Huh? Why is the station on wheels?" Top Secret! is full of gags like this where the premise is brilliant, the execution flawless, but the punchline is a tad unclear—the best of these features Peter Cushing as the owner of a Swedish bookstore that plays on the notion that the Scandinavian language sounds a lot like English played backward. Rather than laugh at the scene, you're left marveling at what you just witnessed after it's over.

Top Secret! was a modestly budgeted production but featured top-shelf craftsmen who all treated the proceedings seriously, which aligned with the ZAZ principle that spoof movies are funnier when most everything is played straight. It boasts photography by the British cinematographer Christopher Challis, a 70-year veteran of features from the 1940s onwards, including The Tales of Hoffmann for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the Albert Broccoli musical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the 70mm extravaganza Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. The production design is by the great British art director Peter Lamont, known for his Academy Award-winning work on Fiddler on the Roof, The Spy Who Loved Me, Aliens, and Titanic. It has a rousing and romantic score by legendary composer Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, A Passage to India, The Longest Day, The Train, Eyes Without a Face, Grand Prix, The Man Who Would Be King, Witness, Dead Poets Society, Gorillas in the Mist, Fatal Attraction, Ghost).

One of the picture's most stellar attributes is the lead performance by the young Val Kilmer in his film debut. Starring as an American Rock 'n' Roll star representing the US at a cultural festival in Germany—which is actually a staged distraction from the East German government's plot to reunite the nation under its authoritarian military rule—Kilmer plays everything straight and scores big laughs at every turn. He also nails the musical performances. Singing and dancing and looking great in every outfit, from a tux to a leather bomber jacket, Kilmer oozes movie star charisma while sending up the very idea of the type of character he's embodying. The supporting cast is excellent, but they are not a whose-who of great stars from earlier eras like those in Airplane! Only Omar Sharif, in a small but key role, fits that bill. Most everyone else is recognizable as someone who has played countless small parts as German officials in many war movies and TV shows or an English character actor who won't become famous for several decades. Kilmor's main co-star and love interest, Lucy Gutteridge, only made five films in her career, this being the second. But, playing the Ingrid Bergmanesque Hillary Flammond, her performance is as spot-on as Kilmer's slick Nick Rivers.

Flammond is a member of the local resistance movement whose imprisoned scientist father is being forced by the East German authorities to build a new weapon. Rivers uses his clout to come to Hillary's rescue several times, and eventually, the two join up with the French Resistance to foil the East German plans. The plot gets ridiculously complicated as more unrelated film references are sprinkled in. I had always assumed this story was entirely made up by the ZAZ team and co-screenwriter Martyn Burke, but I later discovered that, like Airplane!, this movie used a preexisting picture as its template. I don’t think I would have noticed this had the Harvard Film Archive not done a complete Fritz Lang retrospective, at which I saw most of the prolific directors' films from both Germany and America. Lang's mostly forgotten 1946 thriller Cloak and Dagger with Gary Cooper and Lilli Palmer is not used as a direct blueprint for this movie the way Zero Hour! was for Airplane!—I doubt the ZAZ team felt it necessary to purchase the remake rights as they did for Zero Hour! or show clips of the serious film to the cast before shooting comic versions of identical scenes.

You don't really notice that Cloak and Dagger has many of the same beats as Top Secret! until the movie is mostly over, but the bones are certainly there. One of the Zucker brothers has always lamented that Top Secret! would have been a hit if they'd just figured out the ending; in fact, for years, he claimed he knew how to fix it and tried to reshoot the end and rerelease the film to no avail. I found it fascinating while learning about Cloak and Dagger that Lang also hated the ending of that film as he had shot a whole other reel that had been scripted by screenwriters Albert Maltz and Ring Lardner Jr.—two members of the Hollywood 10, who were blacklisted for allegedly being communists and working subversive ideas into scripts such as the removed ending of Cloak and Dagger.

The way Top Secret! was marketed didn't do it any favors. With no stars to sell the picture with, Paramount put out a plain white poster with a picture of a cow wearing boots and the tagline, "*From the makers of the original AIRPLANE! *(Not the Wright Brothers)." It's a funny line, and the cow does feature prominently in the movie's climax, but this was hardly the type of key art that draws an audience. At the end of the day, I think this picture has plenty to keep any viewer with a sense of humor fully entertained, but it might take a film obsessive whose favorite cinematic subject is WWII to embrace it as warmly as I do.

Interestingly, the film most people (especially younger generations) now consider the funniest ZAZ picture is The Naked Gun. That's understandable since the police procedural is one of the most durable genres in all of filmed entertainment, with the formulas and tropes changing very little from the 1950s to the 2020s. Whereas disaster movies and spy thrillers became stylistically almost completely unrecognizable between the end of the '70s and the beginning of the '90s. The spoof movie proved far more durable at the box office than I would have imagined, with films like the Hot Shots pictures and the Scary Movie series. But the genre has pretty much disappeared now that movies have become so self-referential and meta that they spoof and comment on themselves.