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When the latest “Naked Gun” movie came out last year I was
greatly disappointed. Had I become so old that the spoof movies of the eighties
had become too stupid for me and lost their charm? I immediately went home and
put on the original and to my great relief I had not lost the love, it was the
genre that had gotten stupid. It is a year later, I am watching it again and I
am still laughing.
“The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” follows in
the footsteps of “Airplane!”. It takes a well-known genre, in this case the
police procedure movie, and makes a joke out of everything. And I mean
everything. Sometimes there are multiple jokes happening at the same time,
sometime the joke is in the way of the story and so the story must pause and no
joke is too silly. While not every joke works, enough does and they have enough
freshness and charm to be more than just silly.
There is a frame story, though not a terribly important one.
Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) is a police lieutenant who on his return from
beating up the top bad guys in the world, finds that his colleague Nordberg
(O.J. Simpson) has been badly injured. Also, his wife married someone else.
Nordberg was shot six times, touched a hot stove, leaned on a newly painted
door, fell into a wedding cake, stepped in a bear trap and fell out of a window
of a ship into the harbour. Beside looking for the culprits, Drebin is also
involved in the security detail for the British queen’s visit to L.A. We know
early on that Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalbán) is the bad guy, but as he is
also a locally important businessman and host for the queen, Drebin is making
difficult enemies. Luckily, Ludwig has a pretty assistant, Jane Spence (Priscilla
Presley), who also like policemen.
If you know who Leslie Nielsen is, it will not be a surprise
that Lt. Drebin is a complete disaster. He can hardly open a door without
somebody getting hurt and he has this face that looks completely oblivious to
the effect he has on his surroundings. Combining this character to the very low
but also strangely innocent humour of the team from “Airplane!” is dynamite. Or
at least it was back then when they were at their peak. A silly joke like
Drebin having his microphone open when he goes to the bathroom during a press
conference on the visit of the Queen works every time I watch it. I know it
should not, farting jokes are not that funny, but with Leslie Nielsen it is
hilarious.
What happened later with this genre was that it was
forgotten that any comedy only works if you have a sounding board of normality.
If everything is anarchy it is simply not funny anymore. Even the Marx Brothers
knew this and used the awesome Margaret Dumont for that purpose. “The Naked
Gun” tries to hang on to its “normal” frame story and it has a degree or
normality in the world Drebin operates in. Not a lot, but just enough. Mayor
Barkley (Nancy Marchand) is such a character as is (to some degree) Drebin’s
boss Captain Hocken (George Kennedy). It is a tenuous grip on normality. When
the movie is poorest it is because it is slipping away, but when the movie is
best it is because the joke is up against normality as when Drebin takes over
the role of a famous opera singer and abuse the national anthem at a big
baseball game in front of an amazed audience. We see (and hear) Nielsen, but he
is funny because of the audience.
The spoof genre continued for many years and got worse and
worse. It is not that the jokes were sillier than here, but because the
sounding board disappeared. When, finally, “Naked Gun”, 2025 came around, it
was just dumb.
The original, though, is a lot of fun. Do not expect too
much, just have a good time. Pretty much like you would with “Airplane!”. I
love it.
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