The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! Still Great

It’s worth revisiting The Naked Gun.

At the dawn of the 1980s, three creators changed the face of comedy. Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker made Airplane!, a wild parody of the then-popular disaster films, led by the four-part Airport series. In addition, the production also mocked other hits, such as Saturday Night Fever and Jaws, and its hallmark was that the gags hit the audience with the frequency of a machine gun. Everything was funny – the characters, the dialogue, the settings, the background events. Every element was subordinated to humor: often absurd, sometimes silly, but in the great majority of cases, spot-on.

The film was a huge success, enjoyed by both audiences and critics, so the producers insisted on making a sequel – but the ZAZ trio wanted no part in it. They had a completely different idea: to tackle another popular film genre – the crime story.

The results took two years to arrive. In 1982, the TV series Police Squad! premiered. Its hero was Lieutenant Frank Drebin (played by Leslie Nielsen, who was growing ever more comfortable in comedy), working in the titular special division. The scripts contained all the motifs typical of this genre, but presented in a distorted mirror, heavily spiced with absurdity and drenched in parody.

In short, the production had everything needed to repeat the success of Airplane!. However, that didn’t happen – Police Squad! was canceled after airing just four episodes (out of six that had been filmed). The series died, but the idea lived on.

ZAZ went on to make other films (among them Top Secret! starring Val Kilmer), yet they still wanted to bring Lieutenant Frank Drebin back. Something was always missing from the script – some unifying idea. Only when they added a romantic subplot did the story finally fall into place, and work on The Naked Gun could move full speed ahead.

The result was a film even more packed with gags than Airplane!. They begin in the very first scene, in which Frank Drebin (once again the excellent Leslie Nielsen) takes on contemporary dictators, and continue all the way to the closing credits. The creators deliberately set out to keep audiences in their seats until the very last second of the screening, weaving countless jokes into the credits that viewers had to spot on their own.

The plot, though simple, contains one of the standard clichés of action films – the Queen of England visits the U.S., the special division is tasked with protecting her, and the villain tries to assassinate her. Nothing more, nothing less – the main storyline is only a pretext for the humor.

The greatest strength of The Naked Gun, apart from the jokes themselves, is of course Leslie Nielsen, who delivers even the dumbest and most absurd lines with a completely straight face. He behaves as though he were starring in a serious detective film, not a madcap comedy – and that contrast works brilliantly. Nielsen had already introduced this manner in Airplane!, but here he perfected it, and it was The Naked Gun that crowned him king of parody – a throne he essentially still occupies (though Liam Neeson has just jumped onto his lap, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves).

He is ably supported by Priscilla Presley as Drebin’s love interest (the creators had wanted Bo Derek for the role, but she declined), Elvis Presley’s ex-wife in “real life”; George Kennedy, who sought the role after failing to parody his own Airport character in Airplane!; and athlete-turned-actor O.J. Simpson, here still years away from the infamous scandals of the next decade. The antagonist is played by Ricardo Montalbán, known among other things as the original Khan in the Star Trek universe, resembling the somewhat exaggerated Bond-style villains. From the series, besides Nielsen, two actors return – Ed Williams as the head of the crime lab and his assistant, played by Ronald Taylor. I also must mention the cameo by “Weird Al” Yankovic, who would go on to appear briefly in every subsequent installment. For the music world, he is what the ZAZ trio was for the silver screen.

The film has barely aged, although of course today’s audiences are more sensitive than those of the 1980s, so some sequences may not amuse them or may simply go over their heads. But The Naked Gun offers so many gags, jokes, absurd dialogues, and funny background situations that everyone can find something to laugh at. I could now take a “boomerish” tone and write that they don’t make films like this anymore – but in fact, they just did. So instead, I’ll simply say: it’s worth revisiting The Naked Gun and giving your diaphragm a thorough workout. Frank Drebin’s first big-screen adventure now belongs to the ironclad classics and remains one of the greatest comedies in cinema history.

Written by Piotr Zymelka