The Naked Gun - From the Files of Police Squad! is a spoof of the Quinn Martin cop dramas that dominated television for two decades. I wasn't alive when the great QM produced the Fugitive (1963), but I must have heard "A Quinn Martin Production" narrated to me so many times there are still echoes of it reverberating through my soul - just from The Streets of San Francisco, Cannon and Barnaby Jones alone.

Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) is a spoof of the big-city detective who speaks in non-stop potboiler narration, as if the ghost of Mickey Spillane were something you could stab but never kill. In the TV show, Police Squad, Drebin always patrolled "a big city in America." Here, he's clearly in L.A., which is dressing up for a visit from Queen Elizabeth (Jeannette Charles). Flanked by Captain Ed Hocken (George Kennedy), Drebin is assigned to investigate an attack on Detective Nordberg (O.J. Simpson) in what now feels like a strange twist on future events.

Lurking behind the shadows is patrician, Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban) whose plan to wipe out the British monarch is a weird twist on The Manchurian Candidate. When Drebin comes calling, Ludwig mistakes his idiocy for a ruse - in antics that come straight out of The Pink Panther. To throw Drebin off the case, he sends a femme fatale, the lovely Jane Spencer (Priscilla Presley - yes, THE Priscilla Presley of "I Married Elvis Presley" and "My Daughter Married Michael Jackson" fame).

What makes this film enjoyable is the way it toys with the material, the way Airplane! shredded the Airport franchise, back in 1980. Again and again, cop-drama cliches are hurled into frame, and then shredded without mercy. The secret of Nielsen's success is his dead-pan delivery, which reminds us of his three-decade persona as the most excruciatingly straight of straight men. Rather than ham up the performance, Nielsen plays it just as he did in more than 100 previous credits - but against a backdrop that turns every excruciating cliche into a total absurdity. The other side of the fun is a kind of Inspector Clousseau routine - without the accent - that was funnier in 1988 because it shredded the pomposity of the Reagan-Bush/Pete Wilson conservativism that would eventually go busto with the end of the Gulf War, the painful recession of '92 and the L.A. Riots.

Like the Colbert Report, which uses the persona of "Papa Bear," Bill O'Reilly, to laugh at conservatives, The Naked Gun works best when Nielsen embodies the folly of gung-ho, can-do, no-problem conservatives, though the film also spends its share of time simply laughing at stupid Hollywood cliches. For those who considered Airplane! an absolute howler, The Naked Gun is not quite as funny but there's so much to play with that even if only half its jokes hit home, that's enough to have a knee-slapping good time. What's more, because a lot of the humor is both physical and universal to the detective genre, The Naked Gun is actually easier to watch - today - than Airplane!, many of whose jokes depend on a popculture that no longer exists. Airplane!, for example, spent a fair amount of its time spoofing disaster films today's generation has never seen and commercials they'll never see.

I rented this film again, to show it to my 16-year-old son. What impressed me was the degree to which he laughed - again and again and again - at Nielsen's antics, even in a film that didn't have the digital effects or budget of its successors. This is a comedy that still works, even outside its original context, which is why I recommend it wholeheartedly.

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BACKGROUND INFO (ONLY READ IF YOU CARE)

By the time he took a role in the 1980 spoof, Airplane!, Leslie Nielsen had already racked up 127 credits in TV and film. Over a period of three decades, he had built a reputation as a serious actor. He had starred in the sci-fi classic, Forbidden Planet. He had played the captain in The Poseidon Adventure. Whenever a part called for someone with made-to-order gravitas, a cookie-cutter authority figure with a ready-made speech on the tip of his tongue, Nielsen was the man with the plan.

All that changed in 1980, when spoofmasters - Zucker, Abrams and Zucker (known collectively as ZAZ) - sought out Nielsen and others to turn their bulletproof reputations upside down. Playing it straight, in situations of obvious absurdity, Nielsen would become more famous as a "comic actor" than he'd been as a "straight man."

The Naked Gun - From the Files of Police Squad! is a tribute to Nielsen's ability to see a good thing and run with it. Following the success of Airplane!, it would take two years for Nielsen to apply "Airplane!"-style humor to the role of Detective Frank Drebin on the ill-fated Police Squad, a parody of detective flicks that was simply too cutting-edge for TV. While its six episodes were among the smartest, funniest and most promising 30-minutes on TV, not enough people got the joke to make it work in prime time. Speculation still rages about why this send-up of the Jack Webb/Quinn Martin crime dramas didn't tickle a rib. My guess is that the people who watch TV don't want to make fun of TV. That's like telling Bush jokes at the GOP Convention. What you need is a different venue - like film.

Be that as it may, it took six years to convince Paramount to pump an undisclosed figure into the budget of a film based on a failed TV show. Why Paramount rolled the dice, eight years after the success of Airplane!, is anybody's guess. My bet is that Paramount got tired of watching other studios cash in on a concept they should have exploited after Airplane! had won 4th place at the box office in 1980 (its most successful film that year). While the studio did go on to have the biggest film of 1981 (Raiders of the Lost Ark), it's curious that Paramount didn't follow-up with an Airplane!-type of comedy. The next year, Airplane II: The Sequel, had only a third of the success, landing at number 28 - and getting out-FOX-ed by Young Doctors in Love, which was only marginally more successful, but which scooped Airplane II by five months.

But life has a way of turning things around.

According to my crystal ball, a comeback was in the making in March of that same year, about a week after Police Squad began its six-week experiment in failure. The driving force was another Fox feature, Porky's, whose box-office success (number 5 for the year) would generate sequels and imitations. Its 1983 sequel, Porky's II, would suffer a similar fate as Airplane II (landing at number 20), but the following year, Police Academy - a kind of "Porky's for cops" would land at number six. Its 1985 sequel - Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment - while not as successful as the original, would give Warner Brothers a reason to crank out another installment - and Paramount a reason to take a closer look at what it might have if it could generate a worthy me-too project.

1986's Police Academy III and its 1987 sequel brought that franchise to a slow (ranking 17th and 44th respectively). In the meantime, cop comedies - Stakeout, Lethal Weapon and Dragnet (ranking 8th, 9th and 14th respectively) - did well enough for Buena Vista, Warner Brothers and Universal to give Paramount a reason not to get outfoxed again. Its Beverly Hills Cop franchise (#1 in 1984; #3 in 1987) may well have been another factor. Whatever the case, six years after the failure of Police Squad - and 8 years after the success of Airplane! - Leslie Nielsen returned to comedy (after 27 re-appearances as the straightest of straight men in TV or film).

The rest is history.

Because of the success of The Naked Gun (8th at the box office for 1988), Nielsen would continue the franchise through 1994 and make a name for himself as a spoofster's wet dream. His second-act credits would include Repossessed (1990), Spy Hard (1996), Wrongfully Accused (1998), 2001: A Space Travesty (2000), Scary Movie 3 (2003) - and the upcoming Scary Movie 4 (2006). Considering the fact that he's totally deaf, it's amazing what he's been able to do on his way to 80 (He was born February 11, 1926).

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older