The Hip Pocket #38: TOP SECRET!

We say a very silly goodbye to a giant

There is no single canon.

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

Top Secret!
Omar Sharif, Jeremy Kemp, Warren Clarke, Tristram Jellinek, Val Kilmer, Billy J. Mitchell, Major Wiley, Gertan Klauber, Richard Mayes, Vyvyan Lorrayne, Nancy Abrahams, Ian McNeice, John Sharp, Lucy Gutteridge, Michael Burlington, Marcus Powell, Louise Yaffe, Charlotte Zucker, Susan Breslau, Helen Kahan, Burton Zucker, Richard Pescud, John J. Carney, Orla Pederson, Russell Sommers, Michael Gough, Sara Montague, Gerry Paris, David Adams, Geoff Wayne, Seve Ubels, Chas Bryer, Mac McDonald, Peter Cushing, Mandy Nunn, Lee Sheward, Janos Kurucz, Sydney Arnold, Harry Ditson, Christopher Villiers, Jim Carter, Eddie Tagoe, Dimitri Andreas, Michelle Martin, Nicola Wright, Lisa Gruenberg, Daisy, Andrew Hawkins, Richard Bonehill
cinematography by Christopher Challis
music by Maurice Jarre
screenplay by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker & Martyn Burke
produced by Jon Davison and Hunt Lowry
directed by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker
Rated PG
1 hr 30 mins

A rock’n’roll musician is pressed into service as a spy when he’s sent to a music festival in East Berlin.

If you weren’t alive when it was released, it is hard to explain just how ubiquitous Airplane! was when it was released. That film was a monster hit, but more than that, it worked its way into pop culture in a way that was transformative. Movie comedy has never been the same, which is weird, because even the guys who made Airplane! had a hard time reproducing the magic of that film.

Their first follow-up was the TV series Police Squad!, which is one of my favorite things. Not one of my favorite shows or one of my favorite comedies, but one of my favorite things, full-stop, right up there with fire and pizza and the color blue. I have seen all six episodes of that show at least fifteen or twenty times, and any time I am in dire need of an emotional lift, it’s one of the things I will reach for. It is perfect. It is so relentlessly funny, so incredibly calibrated, that it makes it look easy. Effortless, even. Police Squad! is a half-hour sitcom that ran on ABC, and as soon as it debuted in 1982, it was clear the general public just couldn’t handle that kind of comedy on TV.

There’s no difference between the approach to comedy in Police Squad! and Airplane! besides where they were intended to be shown. In a theater, you give your full attention to the screen. You are fully immersed in the thing, and as a result, when they stage jokes in the foreground and the background at the same time, you can enjoy both of them. You’re with the filmmakers. On TV, especially in the early ‘80s, you’re talking about something totally different. You’re competing for attention. TV wasn’t quite the second-screen model we are increasingly stuck with today, but you’ve always had to deal with the idea that life continues around you when you’re watching TV. The phone rings, the dog barks, the kids yell, the neighbor’s cutting his grass… whatever. It’s chaos. And people not only couldn’t keep up with foreground and background jokes, they felt like the entire thing was just too fast, too relentless. It’s crazy to look at the show now and try to see why audiences were so baffled. Pop culture has long since blown past the kind of information overload that Police Squad! embodies. It’s almost quaint how low-key the show is when viewed through a modern lens.