Naked Gun, The: From the Files of Police Squad! (DVD)

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The folks at Paramount continue relentlessly forward with their "I Love the 80's" series of repackaged material. Their second wave of DVD releases includes "Ordinary People," "An Officer and a Gentleman," "The Accused," "Top Secret!," "Cheech & Chong Still Smokin'," and the film under consideration here, "The Naked Gun, from the Files of Police Squad!"

All of these re-releases appear to be identical to the discs Paramount issued a few years earlier, only this time they get slightly different artwork, new slipcovers, and a bonus CD of "Music from the 80's" that contains "Lips Like Sugar" by Echo & the Bunnymen, "Chains of Love" by Erasure, "Need You Tonight" by INXS, and "Take on Me" by a-ha. Obviously, the studio brass do not intend these reissues for people who already own the movies on disc; they mean them for new buyers who need that extra incentive to purchase them. Since, so far, they're all good movies in pretty decent shape, you can't go wrong, especially with "The Naked Gun," a genuine prize.

Speaking of comedy, I'm sure most people recognize there's a built-in audience hierarchy that artists, writers, and filmmakers keep in mind when they produce their entertainments. At the top of the pile is usually the poem, potentially the most complex structure of all. Next comes the novel, which calls upon a reader's ability to observe and reason. Then the stage play, followed by the movie. At the bottom of the ladder is the TV show, for which producers think viewers so witless they have to use laugh tracks to let them know where the jokes are. I mention this because "The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!" began on television, where it cultivated a small but loyal following during its brief run. However, satire, and its sub category, parody, demands a degree of sophistication from its audience, or at least a degree of awareness, and television obviously didn't provide it.

Then, there was this first of the "Naked Gun" movies in 1988 and, whammo, instant success with slightly more-hip viewers. "The Naked Gun" was so successful, in fact, that it spawned two sequels, "The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear" in 1991 and "The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult" in 1994. The sequels didn't match the original in terms of laughs-per-minute, but they maintained the same level of zaniness, wringing the last ounce of humor from the format. No complaints about the original, though, and it could hardly lose with Jerry and David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Pat Proft as the filmmakers. They're the team that had brought us "Airplane!" and "Top Secret!" a few years earlier, and they are masters of the exclamation mark.

In "The Naked Gun" Leslie Nielsen stars as Lt. Frank Drebin of the Los Angeles Police Squad. He is, without a doubt, the world's dumbest policeman, on a par for klutziness with the immortal Inspector Clouseau. It wasn't always thus for Nielsen, though. He is one of the few actors in Hollywood to have metamorphosed into comedic preeminence. His career began long before his doing comedy, as a leading man in films like "Forbidden Planet" (1956), "Tammy and the Bachelor" (1957), "Dark Intruder" (1965), and "Beau Geste" (1966). Then there was a long period of supporting roles, followed by his breakthrough into funny business with "Airplane!" in 1980. But it wouldn't be until the "Naked Gun" series that he came into his own as one of America's best-known comic actors. Who would have guessed until he tried. Maybe it was Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers who first saw his possibilities; after all, it was they who put a whole slew of former movie tough guys into their wacky pictures and made them play the comedy straight. Remember Robert Stack, Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, Chuck Conners, and the rest from "Airplane!"? They were all great, but it was Nielsen who went on to comedic glory. Abrahams and the Zuckers have accomplished something of that sort with "The Naked Gun," too, in that big George Kennedy, O.J. Simpson, and Ricardo Montalban also come off as pretty funny guys. I suppose it's a gift.

Getting back to the story, the movie starts with Drebin in Beirut, where he thwarts an international terrorist plot against the U.S., breaking up a meeting of Khadafi, Khomeini, Gorbachev, Idi Amin, and Yasir Arafat (or Ringo Starr, it's hard to tell). Returning to the States a hero, he's greeted by his long-suffering partner and straight man, Capt. Ed Hocken, played with wonderfully deliberate, deadpan drollness by Kennedy. There, Drebin immediately gets involved tracking down a drug-smuggling ring led by millionaire shipping-tycoon Vincent Ludwig (Montalban).