Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-Review by Professor Popinjay

(1984)

I suppose I’ll have to put this warning here:

SPOILERS! ALOT OF SPOILERS! OMG SO MANY SPOILERS! I SPOIL SO MUCH OF THIS FILM AND I’M SORRY! JUST GO WATCH THIS FIRST AND COME BACK AND READ IT, OKAY!?! THEN I WON’T FEEL SO BAD! GAAAAH!!!

I think it was a random video on YouTube or Facebook (author expactorates in disgust) that was showing little known movie gems which introduced me to this film starring the late great Val Kilmer. My wife and I were both surprised we’d never heard of it and knew we’d have to see it soon. It looked hilarious.

It’s a screwball comedy made by the same writers and directors of the more widely known Airplane and Hot Shots films. As we saw with the resurgence of The Naked Gun, these kinds of films are making a bit of a comeback. So long as they don’t de-evolve into something like the Scary movie franchise again, I’ll fully welcome them.

The video we saw was correct. Top Secret! certainly is a bit of an unknown gem. The humor swings from the ridiculous, to the clever, to the strangely subtle. I shan’t spoil the jokes here but I would at least like to draw attention to some of the subtleties.

Right off the bat, a German soldier addresses an officer. When the soldier removes his helmet his chinstrap remains under his chin. The officer observes the papers brought to him and stamps them with a ready-made stamp that reads “Find him and kill him!” They have a stamp for that! I guess that’s necessary when you find yourself writing those specific words a lot.

One joke, that must have cost a fortune, had very little pay off if the audience wasn’t paying close attention. We see the train station through the window as the train begins to leave. As the train passes the station only then do we see the landscape behind the station remaining stationary. It was not the train leaving, it was the whole station being hauled off. The train wasn’t moving at all! They even show an outside shot of the station being dragged away on a separate train car. The lengths this film went for even the smallest joke was impressive.

Another subtly was the prevalence of shots panning over to a fireplace whenever the main characters became romantically entangled. In one instance the shot pans to a fireplace but the characters, rolling around together in the thralls of ecstasy, end up back in the shot in front of the fireplace. Naturally this requires another pan away to, you guessed it, yet another fireplace.

At one point the characters have a romantic moment while parachuting. Val actually plummets past Lucy Gutteridge a bit and she calls him back up, a request not possible to acquiesce with a round parachute. They talk for a moment and then kiss. Sure enough the camera pans away to reveal, what else, a fireplace! It’s parachuting right down with them just so they can have this romance in the sky. Amazing.

I’ll stop explaining away the humor though.  There’s plenty more and probably much I missed.

There’s also lots of interesting actors in this! Some are cameos of well known people. Others are actors who would become much more recognizable later.

The distinguished Peter Cushing makes a rare appearance in a comedy film and his scene is run backwards! Probably some of the best backward acting I’ve ever seen in a film from all the actors in that scene.

Interestingly, a plaster cast of Cushing’s face was made for a gag in this scene and it was that exact first generation plaster cast that was used to create the digital scan used to make Guy Henry appear as Grand Moff Tarken in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story!

Keep an eye out for other actors who would become more well known later such as:

Ian McNeice [Fulton Greenwall from Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls, Baron Harkonnen in Frank Herbert’s Dune (2000) and Children of Dune (2003)]

Michael Gough [Alfred from Batman (1989, 1992, 1995, 1997), Notary James Hardenbrook from Sleepy Hollow (1999)]

Jim Carter [Abacus Crunch in Wonka (2023), Mr. Carson from Downton Abbey (2019)]

Aside from the humor, Val Kilmer is quite entertaining when he’s doing his song and dance routines and there are a welcome handful of these moments. It’s no surprise he did so well as Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991).

Although, the scene where he’s pretending to un-alive himself in multiple ways, distraught as his 1950s-style love ballad makes him out to be while his lyrics pine for reciprocation from an unseen object of infatuation… it didn’t age well and it goes a bit too far. That and the girl from the audience, whom he brings on stage, seems just a tad too young for him. He never gets inappropriate though. She’s just a fangirl basically and he’s playing a part. I think she faints from twitterpation with no one catching her. That part was actually pretty funny.

I’d love to tell you about everything great in this movie but I’ll just highly recommend watching it. Oh my God! The cow scene!

For more in-depth info about the Peter Cushing lifecast click this link to Tom Spina Designs:

https://www.tomspinadesigns.com/news/media/grand-moff-tarkin-lifecast-rogue-one/