The Naked One

Happy Black Friday, everyone. Recently, Variety published their list of the top 100 comedies of all time. As usual, there are all kinds of problems with the list. The only Buster Keaton movie is Sherlock Jr., the only Chaplin movie is The Great Dictator, yet there are two Howard Hawks movies and two Coen Brothers movies. Some of the movies, like Poor Things at number 65, barely seem to qualify as a comedy. Withnail and I is kind of funny but I don't know if it belongs in the top 100. Of course, there are very few foreign films on the list, just a few French movies, but comedy is the genre that most rarely translates effectively. Comedy typically relies on a lot of cultural references. The exception is physical comedy, which tends to be universal, so it's not a surprise one of the French movies is a Monsieur Herlot movie, though I'm surprised it's Playtime. I'm a little surprised there's no Jackie Chan movie on the list.

The real controversial choice is the number one pick, 1988's The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad. I don't know if it really deserves to be at number one, but it's certainly a damn funny movie. I watched it last night. I don't think I'd seen the whole thing since I was a kid, though I've watched Police Squad, the series it's based on, a few times, in the intervening years. Police Squad may be a little cleverer but it's hard for any movie to rival Naked Gun for sheer density of jokes of a wild variety of subject matter that the narrative nonetheless flows smoothly through. One moment, you're laughing at the repeated sight gag of Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) invariably crashing into something when he stops his car and next you're laughing at some nonsense wordplay or Frank mistaking someone else's press conference as his own.

The first scene doesn't really work. Frank beating up a bunch of despotic world leaders just seems like an odd daydream but, after that, the movie's consistent gold. A lot has been said about the perfection of Leslie Nielsen's deadpan but Priscilla Presley is pretty good, too.

It's common to portray the hardboiled cop as an untidy bachelor and I love how this scene takes it to an absurd extreme. There's not one item in Frank's fridge that's not impossibly ancient. It's great how Priscilla Presley just keeps nattering on and only slows down slightly when she sees the odd assortment of mouldy objects in the freezer.

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! is available on Netflix.