jcaswell - recently asked readers to name their favourite film. I picked, without a moment's hesitation, The Naked Gun, because it entertains me more than anything else in the world.This is a film I must have seen a hundred times, literally. I could probably recite the script off by heart. Yet it still makes me laugh hard and often. Snippets pop into my head from time to time and I grin to myself. Hearing 'I'm Into Something Good' by Herman's Hermits always raises a smile.
It's the story of tough Los Angeles detective lieutenant Captain Frank Drebin, who returns from a vacation in Beirut to find his partner Nordberg in a coma and facing drugs charges. In the quest to clear his friend's name, Frank stumbles across a plot to assassinate the Queen of England on her state visit to the city.
But that's not important right now.
There are sight gags. There are one-liners. There are rude jokes. There are wonderful pastiches of the hard-nosed cop genre. There are lines so surreal that the cast pause and look at the camera in confusion. There's Queen Elizabeth II lying in a cake with her legs wide open.
All the cast are good, but Leslie Nielsen is just fantastic; brilliantly deadpan, with excellent timing and superb physical humour too. Much of the time, you wonder whether he realises he's in a comedy at all - given how little his acting style has changed since 1956's Forbidden Planet.
I could go on at great length about all my favourite scenes, but since a picture paints a thousand words I decided to make some of them into icons instead.
(My other favourite bit is the microphone-in-the-men's-room gag, but that's difficult to convey as a 100x100 image.)
← Ctrl ← Alt
Ctrl → Alt →
← Ctrl ← Alt
Ctrl → Alt →