zaz

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)

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I had a very difficult time getting anyone interested enough in the new Naked Gun to go see it with me, so much so that Brandon beat me to the punch with his review of it. Suffice it to say, we are in agreement that it’s a delight. And man, Elon Musk sure is catching strays out there in theaters this year, isn’t he? Between very thinly veiled versions of him appearing as villains in The Naked Gun, M3GAN 2.0, Superman, Mountainhead, and LifeHack, and a stand-in for him realizing that his whole life has been wasted and he’s likely hellbound in The Phoenician Scheme, this really hasn’t been a good year for him, has it? I doubt we’re going to Hollywood Carol him into turning his life around, but it sure is nice to see him getting egg on his face. But let’s return to a simpler time, when a movie’s evil villain didn’t have to be the richest man in the world, and when simply being a high-level drug trafficker with designs on killing Queen Elizabeth II was enough. 

Lt. Frank Derbin (Leslie Nielsen) of LAPD’s special unit called Police Squad has just returned from a vacation overseas, where he had a bit of a busman’s holiday in the form of busting up a conference of the United States’ then-greatest enemies, including Yasser Arafat, Ayatollah Khomeini, Idi Amin, and Mikhail Gorbachev (whose famous birthmark Derbin reveals to be a fake). Upon returning home, he learns that his girlfriend has left him and his partner, Officer Nordberg (O.J. Simpson), is in the hospital after attempting to bust a heroin operation aboard a ship in L.A. Harbor, where he was caught and shot by men who work for shipping magnate Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban). Nordberg’s wife begs Drebin to find the men responsible, but heroin found on Nordberg’s jacket points to him having been on the take; Drebin is given only 24 hours by Captain Ed Hocken (George Kennedy) to clear Nordberg’s name, as Police Squad has been authorized by Mayor Barkley (Nancy Marchand, aka Livia Soprano) to take charge of security operations for the impending visit of Liz II. Meanwhile, Ludwig instructs his unsuspecting secretary, Jane (Priscilla Presley), to get close to Drebin and learn what he knows under the guise of wanting to purge his company of any potential illegal activities. Jane and Frank immediately fall in love, but can he stop Ludwig’s plan to assassinate the queen, clear Nordberg’s name, and butcher the national anthem in 85 minutes? I mean 24 hours? 

I have pretty strong memories of watching The Naked Gun as a kid, but I think that I probably saw the film’s first sequel more often, given that it was likely cheaper to license for television. At the very least, very few of these gags were familiar to me (other than the scene in which Derbin accidentally drops Ludwig’s pen into a fish tank and ends up killing one of the prized tropical fish in the process of fishing it out). I think part of that might have been that child-me would have been a little bored by the film’s ending, as it spends a pretty long time at a baseball stadium, and as a reluctant little league player during the wave of Angels in the Outfield, Field of Dreams, Little Big League, and countless other family baseball movies, I would have tuned out. In fact, as much as I was enjoying this movie, the back half is largely eaten up by Frank attempting to stop an assassination attempt at Anaheim Stadium, and I started to feel my opinion of it waver. Luckily, the location allows for a lot of beats in which Nielsen gets to do something hilarious, which made up for the fact that the film parks itself there for so long. One of the best bits involves Frank faking his way onto the field by knocking out and taking the place of a famed international opera singer, which leads to him ending up on the mound, “singing” a half-remembered version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s a delight, as is all of the stadium nonsense during which the queen is subjected to the vagaries of a baseball game, like having to ask someone to get out of your seat or ingest “dugout dogs” (one of which Ludwig discovers, to his horror, contains the remains of one of his lackeys who fell into the vat while trying to kill Frank). 

Humor is subjective, and one of the difficult things about reviewing it, as we’ve said before, is that the issue with a lot of discussions of comedy is that they can often simply devolve into recapping the jokes or reciting the dialogue. What I will say about the friend that I was finally able to convince to go see the new Liam Neeson Naked Gun was that he was glad I talked him into it, and that although he didn’t enjoy the sight gags as much as I did, he found the dialogue very funny, and I think that’s a testament to what works about Naked Gun conceptually. I love all of the visual puns and the playing around with the language of film (there’s a particularly funny bit where the camera pans from one room to another, with most of the characters going through the set door while Frank merely steps around the edge of the set wall), but even if that’s not something that you’re going to enjoy as much as I did, you’ll probably still get a kick out of the cleverness of the dialogue. I’d still say that this one ranks below my personal favorite spoof flick, Top Secret!, but that’s a high bar to clear, and I’ll admit that it’s not without its flaws—in particular, that it spends several minutes doing a direct parody of The Blue Lagoon rather than the genre tropes that it traffics in for most of the runtime is arguably worse than the baseball digression that happens in Naked Gun. 

It’s also interesting to look back at this one and see how much the most recent film drew from it without needing an audience to be familiar with its specifics. There is, of course, the scene in which two characters’ innocent misadventures are mistaken for degeneracy by an observer, Frank’s horny clunkily inelegant internal monologue upon meeting his love interest, and the scenes in which Frank gets raked over the coals by his superior. More specifically, when John Huston was explaining his master plan to his cronies in this year’s sequel, I said aloud, to my companion, “Isn’t this the exact plot of Kingsman?” (It is.) But the “use technology to brainwash people into committing acts of violence” villain plan is actually taken directly from the original, albeit on a much larger scale. In this film, Ludwig is able to use a remote device to turn people into Manchurian assassins; it’s never explained in any detail, as we just get close-ups of the sleeper agents’ watches when he pushes the button, and that’s all that we need to know. Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. 

If you’re feeling a little nostalgic for an old school Naked Gun experience after seeing the new one, or need something to tide you over until you get the chance to check it out yourself, you really can’t go wrong with this one. Unusually for a comedy of its age, very few of the jokes have aged poorly, especially in comparison to some of “racial” comedy in the Hot Shots! movies; it’s possible that the film’s opening could come across as offensive if one wasn’t aware that the characters at the conference are specific world leaders/figures of the time, but that can’t be helped. If anything, the only thing that really dates this is the presence of the late (“alleged”) killer O.J. Simpson, but he’s not given much to do in this one other than be injured over and over again. That’s got to be worth it to somebody, right? 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

If Released in Another Time, Big Business (1988) Could’ve Easily Been a ZAZ-Style Spoof of Old Hollywood Farces

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EPSON MFP image

Somehow during our lengthy conversation surrounding our February Movie of the Month, the Bette Midler/Lily Tomlin swapped-twins comedy Big Business, I had foolishly overlooked who had actually directed the damned thing. Big Business‘s director, Jim Abrahams, is the “A” in the infamous comedic filmmaking team ZAZ. Along with brothers David & Jerry Zucker, Abrahams was responsible for popularizing the concept of the spoof comedy. As a collaborative trio ZAZ penned & directed Airplane!, Top Secret!, Hot Shots, Hot Shots Part Deux, and the Naked Gun trilogy, which pretty much covers the pillars of the medium. Flying solo, Abrahams also has screenwriting credits for Scary Movie 4, Kentucky Fried Movie, an some horrific-looking monster titled Jane Austen’s Mafia!. In isolation the name Jim Abrahams failed to ring any bells, but the team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker was a force to be reckoned with, one that changed the comedy cinema landscape if not for the better than at least for the sillier.

Although I feel foolish that I didn’t recognize Abrahams’ hand in Big Business sooner, it totally makes sense in retrospect. The most crucial aspect of the film that stuck out to me was its dedicated homage to Old Hollywood comedies. Viewing the film with Abrahams in mind now, I see a much different sort of half-formed homage lurking in Big Business. It’s basically just one gentle push away from an Old Hollywood spoof. The film’s swapped-twins contrivance, grand hotel setting, borrowed gag from Duck Soup, endless line of eligible bachelors waiting to marry its protagonists, narrow-minded depictions of the difference between wealth & poverty, and over-the-top lengths to keep its mismatched twins from ending the ruse all once played like a love letter to a bygone era in studio system filmmaking. Now they feel like seeds to what could’ve been a fullblown Old Hollywood spoof after a couple of joke-heavy rewrites. The framework for a ZAZ-style spoof is lurking just under the surface of Big Business, waiting, begging for a sea of juvenile gags to fill in the blanks.

I think the major reason why Big Business didn’t take that direction is a question of timing. The film was released during a time frame where Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker were still a functioning unit, but the timing was off for an Old Hollywood spoof in terms of box office potential. If you look at the trio’s M.O., they generally stuck to spoofing film genres that were active in the era in which they worked. Airplane! spoofed the large-cast disaster film genre (specifically parodying Airport 1975 most heavily) at the tail end of the decade when they were A Thing. Top Secret! spoofed spy movies, a genre that never dies. The Hot Shots! series spoofed 80s & 90s action cinema in a time when that would’ve still been a relevant target, focusing heavily on Top Gun & Rambo for inspiration. Seeing as how it would’ve been impossible for Abrahams to create an Old Hollywood spoof in the Old Hollywood era, given that he was a child in its heyday, he would have had to achieved that distinction sometime in the 2000s or 2010s, long after the dissolution of the ZAZ partnership & well into his old age. Why so recently? Nostalgia has been kind to homages & parodies to the genre, which made room for wonderful comedies like Forgotten Silver & Hail, Caesar! to exist (though not flourish financially, unfortunately). In the 1988 an Old Hollywood spoof might’ve been hard to pitch to financiers, but in 2016 it’d have a much easier time making it to the cinema.

As is, Big Business has no interest in being an Old Hollywood parody. It is instead a loving homage to a bygone era in filmmaking. What Abrahams does instead is update the era’s comedic farce conventions for a 1980s sensibility, which was much less of a commercial gamble. That’s not to say that his history in genre parody did not inform his work in Big Business, though. If nothing else, Abrahams’ films display a consistent, innate understanding of genre tropes & how they can be made effective, whether for a genuine or a sarcastic effect. And if there’s any question to whether or not Big Business‘s toying with the idea of Old Hollywood parody was intentional, just look to Abrahams’ directorial cameo in the film. He plays a homeless drunk who rubs his eyes & tosses his liquor bottle aside when he keeps seeing the two sets of twins separately, a gag that’s about as old as comedy cinema itself (if not older). At the very beat before the end credits the film reveals that a second, well-dressed, far-from-homeless character was also portrayed by Abrahams, a reveal that’s meant to play as a huge prank. That moment feels like it easily could’ve been at home in the theoretical spoof version of Big Business that sadly doesn’t exist, not only because it feels so hokily old-fashioned, but also because its “Gotcha!” sarcasm is such a classic ZAZ-style tactic.

For more on February’s Movie of the Month, 1988’s Big Business, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film & last week’s look at its borrowed gag from The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup.

-Brandon Ledet