Moltz

lonelysandwich:

“Top Secret!” (1984) Backwards Scene, Forwards

At the end (or beginning) of the famous “Backwards Swedish Bookstore” scene during last night’s screening of “Top Secret!” (hosted by Weird Al, no less), the audience burst into spontaneous applause. Above, the scene is run as photographed, to appreciate the acrobatics involved, as well as a couple of Easter egg jokes (“He said you may have a certain rare book. Europe on Five Quaaludes a Day”). That said, some notes from the screening:

• Tremendously underrated in its time, “Top Secret!” was a financial failure. It and “Kentucky Fried Movie” (1977) are my favorites of the Zucker Brothers movies.
• I first saw it in the theater with my family, as a second choice when “Mask” was deemed too mature in its subject matter.
• There are no unfunny jokes in the movie, and the audience laughs loudly and consistently throughout. This is uncommon in movies.
• Seeing it with an audience of fans as opposed to alone in a room with a bag of Taco Bell alerted me to at least one joke I’d missed entirely. In the very beginning, a young Nazi soldier removes his helmet, yet his chinstrap remains.
• A few scenes featuring the French resistance are interrupted by one of its members entering the scene having been badly beaten. His name is “Latrine”. This kills me.
• Val Kilmer and Lucy Gutteridge move their tongues around in the pockets of their cheeks during their kissing scene. This is how I learned about Frenching.
• A headshot of Cher hangs in Val Kilmer’s jail cell. According to Weird Al, this joke worked well in 1984 because Val Kilmer was known to audiences only as the pretty boy who was dating Cher at the time.
• If money were no object, if I already had everything in the world, I would ask for my birthday a bottle of ‘84 Ripple Blanc. Redd Foxx called it “the national wine of Watts”.

I love this movie. Personal favorites are the password exchange with Omar Sharif (“In women’s tennis, I always root for the lesbian.”) and Gutteridge’s wistful line about whether things would work between her and Kilmer (“Things change. People change. Hairstyles change. Interest rates fluctuate…” [looks away]).

The latter I repeated in a department presentation about how our IT infrastructure has changed over time. The crowd reacted with stony silence. Philistines.