Top Secret!

Nick Rivers, an American rock star, travels to a music festival in East Germany and falls in with a resistance movement. The film parodies two genres at once: Elvis musicals and Second World War spy pictures. Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker genuinely struggled with the script. By David Zucker's account they had the scenes they wanted to make first and tried to fit a plot around them afterwards. Writer Martyn Burke joined to build the structure, and Jerry Zucker called his contribution essential to finishing it. It is Val Kilmer's first film, and he sings the songs himself. Two technical tricks are what people remember. For the underwater bar fight, the actors held their breath in ten to fifteen second stretches. The Swedish bookshop scene was shot in reverse and played backwards, so the dialogue genuinely sounds like Swedish. On a budget between 8.5 and 9 million dollars it grossed 20.5 million, which counted as a disappointment at the time. It became a cult film later. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 77 percent, Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars, and Weird Al Yankovic has called it his favourite film of all time. Who it is for: viewers who like high joke density and no interest in logic. Who it is not for: anyone unfamiliar with the sources. Some of the jokes require knowing Elvis vehicles and wartime melodrama.