Top Secret! (1984) – Review

“It all sounds like some bad movie.” – Hillary (Lucy Gutteridge) and Nick (Val Kilmer).

In addition to being a fan of rock music, as I’ve made clear, I’m also a fan of movies that are musicals that use rock, though not all; I’m not, for example, a big fan of Elvis Presley’s movies, even the ones that are considered his better movies (Michael Curtiz’s King Creole). I am also a big fan of spy movies, mostly the ones that lean towards John le Carre, but though I’m not a big fan of the James Bond franchise (I do like a few of the movies), I do like the ones that are more entertaining. For their follow-up to Airplane!, Jim Abrahams, and David and Jerry Zucker decided to parody spy movies with Elvis movies, and the result, Top Secret!, is just as funny and entertaining for me.

Col. Von Horst (Warren Clarke) warns Nick not to get involved.

The Elvis figure here is Nick Rivers (Val Kilmer), a popular singer who gets sent to a East German music festival. The spy part comes when, while at a restaurant, he comes across Hillary Flammond (Lucy Gutteridge), a mysterious woman who is part of a resistance movement against the government, and who is trying to free her father (Michael Gough), a scientist who is being forced to build a weapon for the government (who are Communists, but act like WWII Nazis). And…well, maybe it’s better if Nick tells it:

Nick: Listen to me, Hillary. I’m not the first guy who fell in love with a woman that he met at a restaurant who turned out to be the daughter of a kidnapped scientist, only to lose her to her childhood lover who she last saw on a deserted island, who then turned out fifteen years later to be the leader of the French underground.
Hillary: I know. It all sounds like some bad movie.
(the two pause, and then slowly turn to look at the camera)

Nigel (Christopher Villiers) with Hillary and Nick.

As with Airplane!, ZAZ (who directed by themselves, but co-wrote the movie with Martyn Burke) avoided casting the movie with comic actors, or comedians. This was Kilmer’s first movie (I’ll talk more about his performance below), but since then, he’s only occasionally done comedies (Real Genius, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). Because most of the cast, except for Kilmer and Omar Sharif (who plays one of the resistance members; he also was not known for comedy, except for being in one of the Pink Panther films), was British, they weren’t as well known to American audiences, but they mostly had a background in drama, just as the Airplane! cast did.

Gutteridge was known for appearing in two miniseries, Little Gloria: Happy At Last (about Gloria Vanderbilt) and an adaptation of Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. Jeremy Kemp, who plays one of the villains, was known for appearing in war movies like Operation Crossbow and The Blue Max (he even wears a prop from that movie in this movie), and was also in the miniseries The Winds of War. Christopher Villiers, who plays Nigel, the leader of the resistance (and, as alluded to above, Hillary’s childhood lover), was best known at the time for appearing in a miniseries version of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which is probably her least comic work. Warren Clarke, who plays another villain, was best known for appearing in A Clockwork Orange, and had also appeared in the miniseries’ Reilly: Ace of Spies and The Jewel in the Crown. Peter Cushing, who played another resistance member, was, of course, best known for playing Grand Moff Tarkin in the first Star Wars movie, and was also known for his appearances in Hammer Horror films.* Finally, Gough had worked steadily in movies and TV for almost four decades previous, and little of it was comedy. So, while the movie doesn’t have the advantage Airplane! did of having actors playing against their specific images, it does have people who take the ridiculousness on display straight, making it all the funnier.

Du Quois (Harry Ditson) and the rest of the Resistance.

Just as with Airplane!, ZAZ are spoofing a lot of different movies, not just the plots of WWII/Cold War spy movies (in particular a 1944 movie called The Conspirators with Paul Henreid and Hedy Lamarr, though there’s a bit of Casablanca added in for good measure) and Elvis movies. When Hillary tells Nick about how she met Nigel, the flashback scenes are a spoof of the 1980 version of The Blue Lagoon that starred Brooke Shields (the two are able to build a house with garage opener just with materials on the island; also, there’s a sex scene that goes beyond what was in that movie), there’s another Jaws spoof (when Nigel and another resistance member are disguised as a cow, and a bull pursues them, the theme from that movie plays), the TV show Bonanza (the climax is a Western-style barfight – underwater), and The Wizard of Oz (when Hillary is saying goodbye to everyone at the end, she adds, “And I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow!”). As with the previous movie, ZAZ throws a lot of gags, often in the same scene, the perfect example being the scene with Cushing, which is in a bookstore; the entire scene was filmed backwards (only Nick and Hillary sliding *up* the fire pole, and a dog walking, give it away), and the dialogue is played backward; not only that, but the “book” Hilary asks for is titled “Europe on 5 Quaaludes a Day”. Not only that, but they don’t just do a gag, they take it as far as it can go. My favorite example is when Nick and the Resistance are at a restaurant, two girls come up and ask if he’s Nick Rivers, he demurs, saying he’s Mel Torme, Nigel starts to point out all the bad things that have happened to the resistance since Nick showed up – as well as the fact there’s a traitor within – and ends with, “How do we know he’s *not* Mel Torme?” (after this, to top it off, Nick does a number, and a resistance member exclaims, “This is not Mel Torme!”). And, of course, they go for any gag, no matter how dumb, and boy are they dumb (Hillary gives another resistance member an envelope that has to be mailed out by no later than that night; it is, of course, an envelope for Publisher’s Clearing House).

Nick performs “Tutti Frutti”.

As it’s a spoof of Elvis movies, there’s a lot of music in the movie too, starting with the opening credits, where Nick performs “Skeet Surfin'”, which is a spoof of Beach Boys songs, over a montage of people surfing while skeet shooting (it’s as crazy as it sounds). At the concert, he performs a song called “Spend This Night with Me”, and as he sings about all the things he’ll do if his baby leaves him, we see Nick lie on train tracks, trying to hang himself in a noose, sticking his head into an oven, and so on. Even the real songs he does – “Tutti Frutti” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” – are done in a jokey way; for the former, it’s done with an orchestra of elderly musicians who ends up smashing their instruments a la Pete Townshend, while the latter ends up as a jingle Nick claims to have written when he was younger (and leads into a great gag parodying how Code-era movies would cut away to certain objects when the two leads started to kiss each other). And Kilmer, who did his own singing, performs all of the songs well. Even the songs which Nick doesn’t sing are funny; when Nick and Hillary are given a ride by a horse-driven carriage (or rather, a Shetland pony), we hear singing, but it’s the horse (and yes, we get the inevitable gag when they ask about his voice, “He caught a cold last week, and he’s just a little hoarse”; the horse then sings “A Hard Day’s Night”). Also at the concert, Nick sings the song, “How Silly Can You Get?”, and Top Secret! answers that question in a very funny way.

*-As it happens, Cushing and Gough had both made guest appearances on the TV show The Avengers – not to be confused with the Marvel Comic or movie spin-offs – but while that show was tongue-in-cheek, they played it straight in their roles.