A Film Canon

The short-lived Police Squad! series was a parody of police procedurals, but by translating it into cinema, Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker create something closer to parodic neo-noir, an expansion of the comic nostalgia-mode glimpsed in Airplane!'s flashbacks. However, if Airplane! was driven by non-sequiturs - complete and utter failures to communicate - then The Naked Gun is driven by semi-sequiturs, utterances that seem almost right. Nowhere is this clearer than in Detective Frank Drebin's (Leslie Nielsen) voiceover, which would play like a loving, parodic homage to those of classical noir - especially William Holden's, in Sunset Boulevard - if it weren't simultaneously inflected through a lush, breathless romanticism that squarely locates it as a mouthpiece of 80s neo-noir. In fact, the film's central joke seems to be that the flamboyant aestheticism of neo-noir actually restores all the effeminacy that the classical noir protagonist is so anxious to disavow, as evinced in Drebin's "female intuition", which helps him crack his case, figure out when it's appropriate to fake orgasms, and turn every utterance he makes awry. This is partly a function of a brilliant script, but it's also the index of an ineffable, offbeat ability on Nielsen's part to denature whatever gravitas or pathos he might be trying to convey, especially anything pertaining to world-weariness, wistfulness or nostalgia. At times, it feels as if Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker might have instructed him simply to put in a dramatic performance, trusting his inherent uncanniness to transform it into comedy. If Airplane! was psychotic, playing around with words as things, then The Naked Gun is neurotic, taking nostalgic emoting to such an intensity that it becomes physical. The result is sentimentality as physical comedy, anticipating the tear-wrung violin strings of Wrongfully Accused, and building to a spectacular, carnivalesque conclusion, in which a film-within-the-film conflates cinematic and baseball audiences, and lights upon romance as the greatest American sport.