Top Secret! (Kingsmere Companies, Paramount, 1984)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next parody movie up on TCM’s agenda was Top Secret!, a film whose weird genesis was explained by Ben Mankiewicz in his intro. It seems that Jim Abrahams and Jerry and David Zucker were at a loss to follow the enormous commercial success of their previous spoof Airplane! (1980) and couldn’t decide on their next project. They thought of doing a parody of World War II movies, James Bond-style espionage thrillers, and rock ‘n’ roll movies including the awful ones Elvis Presley churned out on Col. Tom Parker’s orders in the 1960’s. So they ultimately decided to write a script containing all of them. Unfortunately, while Airplane! had benefited from a relatively strong script based on a serious air-disaster movie, Zero Hour! (1957), Top Secret! was an original whose plot line never quite gelled, despite some quite funny moments. Abrahams and the Zuckers also decided to implement one of the key elements of Airplane!’s success: casting an actor who until then hadn’t been known for comedy, In Airplane! it was Leslie Nielsen, whose image was so altered by the A-Z-Z-team’s use of him that he became a deadpan comic for the rest of his career (throwing audience members who watch the 1956 dead-serious sci-fi film Forbidden Planet and realize midway through they’re not supposed to find Leslie Nielsen funny). Here it’s Omar Sharif, who unlike Nielsen doesn’t at all make the transition from serious (more or less) actor to comic relief. It doesn’t help that Sharif is playing an underwritten role, “Agent Cedric,” or that through most of the movie it’s not clear which side he’s on.

Also, for some reason, Abrahams and the Zuckers decided to set the movie in “East Germany” (just five years before East Germany ceased to exist as a nation, though of course the writer-directors had no way of knowing that was going to happen!) but gave it all the trappings of Nazism: the swastika insignias some of the officer characters wear, the streets named after Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels (in the real East Germany streets were named after people like Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Walter Ulbricht, East Germany’s founding chancellor), and the “Goering Exercise Book” shown in one scene (one of the film’s better sight gags if you remember that the real Herrmann Goering was very, uh, large). The plot deals with German scientist Dr. Paul Flammond (British actor Michael Gough), who’s being held in an East German prison because he won’t work on a program to develop a super-submarine that could make East Germany rulers of the world, or something. Nick Rivers (Val Kilmer, in his feature-film debut and showing off a quite good singing voice; later he’d play bona fide rock star Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s The Doors and, though most of the singing in that film was Morrison’s own from The Doors’ records, Kilmer sang for himself in a few bits they couldn’t cover from the records) is a pretty-boy rock star who’s just become an international sensation with a song called “Skeet Surfin’.” It’s a parody of The Beach Boys, drawing on “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “Little Honda,” “Hawai’i,” “California Girls” and “Do It Again,” and apparently all the parts were sung by Val Kilmer and ex-Turtle, ex-Zappa singer Mark Volman. It might have been funnier if The Beach Boys had done it themselves (eight years earlier they’d contributed a great theme song to the marvelously funny spoof Americathon, “It’s a Beautiful Day,” about a dystopia in which cars have become houses since gas is prohibitively expensive and walking and bicycling have become the main modes of transportation), but it’s still a great scene and the video depicting it – in which people literally shoot at clay pigeons while riding surfboards, and one of them accidentally downs an airplane – is one of the funniest scenes in the movie.

Alas, the plot rears its head as Nick Rivers is invited by mistake to a cultural festival in East Germany, and he’s thrown into the same prison as Dr. Paul Flammond. He tears up a staid German nightspot with a surprisingly good cover of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” in which the German musicians get into the spirit. Then he gets arrested and meets Dr. Paul, only he’s rescued by the local U.S. attaché and Paul’s daughter Hillary (Lucy Gutteridge). Hillary is a leader in the local Resistance and is organizing a commando raid to free her father – the commandos have silly names, most of them derived from foods: Potato (Sydney Arnold), Croissant (Paul Weston), Escargot (Mark McBride) and a Black fighter inevitably named Chocolate Mousse (Eddie Tagoe). They need Nick to come along on the raid because he’s the only person who’s been in the prison before and therefore knows where the baddies are keeping Dr. Paul. There’s been a Blue Lagoon spoof in which the young Hillary’s past is revealed (and she’s played by Mandy Nunn): she was stranded on a desert island with a young blond hottie named Nigel (Lee Sheward). The two have a blissful idyll on the island for two years or so until he’s rescued by a ship while she’s left on the island and ultimately rescued by someone else. Unfortunately, Nigel (played by Christopher Villiers in his older incarnation) turns out to be the traitor in their midst – it turns out the vessel that rescued him was Russian, and they gave him an ideological education that caused him to shift sides in the class war – thereby short-circuiting the Casablanca-style ending the writer-directors were pushing towards in which Nate would nobly relinquish Hillary to the person she needed to be with because she was part of his work. Instead Nate and Hillary flee to the U.S. with Dr. Paul.

There are some great scenes in Top Secret!, including the Blue Lagoon parody, a scene set at a Swedish bookstore whose owner is played by veteran character actor Peter Cushing, and a bizarre bar fight that takes place entirely underwater. Though it’s not clear how the characters are able to breathe, it occurred to me that this is what the Aquaman movies should have looked like (and maybe someone will parody them). But overall Top Secret! isn’t as good a movie as Spaceballs (or Airplane!, for that matter), mainly because the characters aren’t all that interesting and the story doesn’t make that much sense. It also didn’t help that there’s a sequence featuring a Russian ballet company in which the male dancers all have huge erections under their skin-tight trousers, a cheap sex joke I really didn’t think was all that funny – not even when one of the ballerinas stood on one of the mega-hard-ons and balanced herself on one leg.