Top Secret! **** (1984, Val Kilmer, Lucy Gutteridge, Peter Cushing, Omar Sharif, Jeremy Kemp, Warren Clarke, Michael Gough) – Classic Movie Review 6005

In 1984 there were things to laugh about and funny people to make us laugh. Writer-director Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker’s neglected and underestimated 1984 World War Two spy send-up and Elvis films spoof is a hoot.

The young and carefree Val Kilmer proves he is a talented Presley impersonator and shows he can really move his hips around and raise plenty of laughs as Nick Rivers, an amiable rock and roll pop singer hero mixed up with Nazis, beautiful heroine Hillary Flammond (Lucy Gutteridge) and the French Resistance on a performing tour of East Germany.

The story is more of just a situational starting point and the loosest framework for what is only really a series of jokes – visual and verbal. But they are mostly very funny ones, and there are hilarious cameos from Peter Cushing as the Bookstore Proprietor and Omar Sharif as Agent Cedric, too.

Also in the cast are Jeremy Kemp, Warren Clarke, Michael Gough, Christopher Villiers, Harry Ditson and Jim Carter.

It is shot by Christopher Challis, produced by Jon Davison and Hunt Lowry, and scored by Maurice Jarre.

The ZAZ team (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker) went on to make the equally exuberant The Naked Gun series and Airplane!.

It borrows the title of a lovely old British comedy of the Fifties, Top Secret.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 6005

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