Review: "Top Secret" is better, weirder, and funnier than ever at 40

Movie of the Week #17 is a comedy cult classic

Welcome to Movie of the Week, a Wednesday column where we take a look back at a classic, obscure, or otherwise interesting movie each and every week for paid subscribers. Follow this link for more details on everything you get subscribing to Fade to Lack!

“For as long as a single man is forced to cower under the iron fist of oppression, as long as a child cries out in the night, or an actor can be elected president, we must continue the struggle.”

Amen sister. You tell ‘em.

Given my dad’s political leanings, that’s probably one of the only jokes he didn’t like in this movie. He loved Top Secret! - which turns 40 this year, and is getting a 4K Blu-ray release next week in a box-set alongside Airplane and The Naked Gun - and he tried to get me to love it too, picking up a used DVD off eBay when I was in High School and hyping it up as one of his favorite comedies. I remember feeling bad as we watched it together and I failed to laugh at much of anything the movie was doing, but then, it’s hard to fake enjoyment with a comedy. I just didn’t get it. The film bounced right off me, and while my dad tried to play it off as no big deal, I could tell he was disappointed. This is a film that meant something to him, and it’s an awful feeling, a weird kind of vulnerability, to share a movie you’ve got that kind of connection with and see a blank stare in return. Of course, as I’ve learned in the years since, Dad wasn’t alone in his love for Top Secret! This is one of those cult classics in the genuine sense of the term, in that relatively few love it, but those who do love it passionately. Back then, though, I didn’t get it then, and we never talked about it much afterwards. We shared a lot of pop culture with each other, but this wasn’t destined to be one of them.

It's been close to fifteen years since then, but I’m happy to say I finally get it. Top Secret! rocks. Dad was right on this one.

I took the scenic route back around to this movie; since I didn’t connect with it in High School, I never bothered to check out its much more celebrated predecessor, 1980’s inaugural Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker joint Airplane!, until just earlier this year, worried I’d bounce off that one too. Thankfully, though, it played like gangbusters – I was watching it alone on a Sunday night with my dog sleeping next to me, and was laughing like an absolute maniac for all 90 minutes. It’s genius. And as late as I was to the party, it was probably a good thing I waited; this kind of pun-filled, anything-for-a-laugh zaniness really wasn’t part of my comedic vocabulary when I was younger, but it’s something I’ve very much aged into. And that meant I had to give Top Secret! another shot (which started with finding a DVD on eBay, like my dad had done many years earlier, since I have no idea where that disc he bought back then wound up).

The thing about Top Secret! is that it’s virtually impossible to succinctly explain. No elevator pitch exists for this movie. If you look at the big genre parody films made before this – like Airplane! or Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles – or the lazier Scary Movie trend these kinds of films would devolve into before dying off entirely, the target of the jokes is obvious and easy to explain. Usually, it’s right there in the title – Young Frankenstein is a riff on Frankenstein films and Universal horror more broadly. Top Secret! bucks that trend entirely. On the simplest level, it’s a parody of the musical films Elvis Presley made in the 50s and 60s – which is already a much more specific, weird thing to send-up than Westerns or airplane disaster movies – but it’s also playing with World War II adventure serials, Cold War spy thrillers, California surf culture, and, in an extended digression, the infamously bad 1980 Blue Lagoon movie. The film is set in a nebulous ur-20^th century, where many decades of history and pop culture are happening all at once, the Nazis and the Berlin Wall and Elvis and the Beach Boys all collapsed on top of each other in the Reagan 80s, accelerating the anarchic spirit of Airplane! into something genuinely surrealist at times.

But it works, and it works tremendously, if you give yourself over to the film’s exceptionally bizarre wavelength. It is every inch as creative as Airplane!, but its best gags are even more surprising, and its visual jokes are even more clever and sophisticated, playing with conventions of framing and cinematic grammar to consistently delightful effect. The Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker model, at its best, was all about playing things straight right until the moment things zig when you expect them to zag; the harder the curve, the bigger the laugh. Top Secret! takes some extremely sharp turns, and it left me breathless many times over. Sometimes the jokes are clever bits of wordplay, and sometimes they’re completely juvenile; sometimes they’re intentionally weak and lackluster, and sometimes they’re shockingly vulgar (the ‘anal intruder’ joke, and everything leading up to it, is a jaw-dropper). And sometimes, they’re so profoundly bizarre that it’s less about laughing than just appreciating the audacity – the sequence performed backwards with Peter Cushing wouldn’t be out of place in a David Lynch movie, and not just because the reversed speech anticipates what he would do with the Red Room scenes in Twin Peaks five years early.

And amidst it all, Top Secret! is an honest-to-God musical, with big, elaborate, utterly joyous numbers staged with real verve and invention. The film really is just as thorough and knowledgeable about the thing it’s parodying as Young Frankenstein is, even as it’s doing it all with something much weirder and more specific.

To this end, Val Kilmer is the film’s most indispensable asset; this was his film debut, ground zero for his entire career, and I think it’s one of the great performances in the history of American comedies. The sheer versatility of everything he’s doing here is astonishing: He’s comedian, straight man, boyish hero, and Elvis-style showman, doing all his own singing and dancing and genuinely bringing the house down when he does. He is the film’s Swiss army knife, the tool that unlocks every weird corner and opens up every unexpected digression Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker want to go down, and it all feels effortless, like this is the most natural thing in the world for him. Kilmer had a weird career full of interesting ups and downs, but I might argue he was never better on film than he was here. I mean that with no disrespect to his later work – I am just that in love with the energy he brings to animate Top Secret!

I adore this movie now, even as I understand why many – including my teenage self – find it hard to access. This one isn’t a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, and it prompts binary reactions: you either vibe with it and love it, or you don’t. I am glad I gave it a second look all these years later, and that I’ve come around to the former reaction. Sadly, it still isn’t something my dad and I can share, as he passed away just over a decade ago now. This just wasn’t one of those films we got to enjoy together, at least not while we were both around at the same time. The great thing about movies, though, is that they’ll wait patiently for you to find them, and when you do, part of the person who led you there might still be waiting. In that way, watching and loving Top Secret! now is both a rediscovery and a reunion.

NEXT WEEK: Because time is rele

Read the book 200 Reviews by Jonathan R. Lack in Paperback or on Kindle

Subscribe to PURELY ACADEMIC, our monthly variety podcast about movies, video games, TV, and more

Like anime? Listen to the podcast I host with Sean Chapman, JAPANIMATION STATION, where we review all sorts of anime every week. Watch on YouTube or Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.