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Regular Applause readers may know of my immense fondness for — some might say obsession with — the 1984 spoof Top Secret!
Not only does it star a young Val Kilmer at his absolute dreamiest — He sings! He dances! He fights in an underwater saloon! — it’s a foolproof means of finding “your people.”
When you meet someone who knows how to properly respond to the sentence “I know a little German” (“He’s sitting over there”), you know you have a friend for life.
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So it was with great sadness that I read Tuesday of Top Secret! director/writer Jim Abrahams’ death from leukemia at age 80.
Along with the Zucker brothers Jerry and David (ZAZ), Abrahams was the architect of some of the silliest, most sneakily brilliant comedies of the ‘80s, including Airplane!, Hot Shots and the Naked Gun series. He leaves behind a legacy of endlessly quoted lines —“Surely you can’t be serious.” “I am, and don’t call me Shirley” among them.
Top Secret! was a box-office bomb, and although I think it’s gained a new audience over the years, it’s far overshadowed by the ZAZ collective’s other work in conversations about the best movie spoofs.
Explaining its failure, one critic/fan singled out “the lack of any clear sense of period, something that may throw viewers who insist on comedic non-essentials like interior logic.”
In fact, I would argue that unwillingness to be beholden to the constraints of genre is exactly what makes Top Secret! so deliriously funny. The cinematic tropes it’s mocking — mostly Second World War films about the French resistance and Elvis movies, although Blue Lagoon is inexplicably thrown in there too — are the barest of framework upon which the filmmakers hang a gaudy, spangled dinner jacket of jokes, an anarchic collection of sight gags, puns and pure silliness so unrelenting that the totally dumb stuff doesn’t even register, because the next shiny bauble has already distracted you.
It’s also full of Easter eggs (or perhaps, considering the context, Passover eggs). In one scene, a snide waiter says something in German that the subtitles portray as “Can I take your order?” He’s actually saying “Gay kaken ofn yahm” — a Yiddish phrase meaning “Go shit in the ocean.”
“The lesson we took from Airplane! was just fill up 90 minutes with jokes, and you have a movie,” David Zucker said. “With Top Secret!, it’s very funny, but it really isn’t a good movie. It really didn’t have a plot or real characters or real structure.”
I say, who needs plot or characters when you have a cow in rubber boots?
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