Val Kilmer: ‘Top Secret,’ His First Movie, Was His Best Movie

Val Kilmer richly deserves all the praise and fond remembrance the Internet is giving him today. He was a uniquely cool and weird movie star, delivering at least a dozen memorable performances in films across the genre spectrum. But he’ll live forever in my mind as the breakout star of my single favorite movie, The Zucker Brothers’s 1984 spy movie parody ‘Top Secret!’, which is also a parody of an Elvis movie. Which is where Kilmer comes in.

Kilmer, making his debut, plays Nick Rivers, an Elvis-like rock star in some ambiguous bygone American era, who also apparently also recorded a Beach Boys-like song called “Skeet Surfin’,” which plays over the opening credits, accompanied by a hilarious Beach Blanket Bingo parody montage.

The story, such as it goes, has Nick Rivers traveling to East Germany to play a cultural festival because Leonard Bernstein can’t make the trip. The extremely sinister East German government is using the cultural festival as a cover to revive Nazi domination of Europe, and then the world. Only the power of rock-n-roll can stop them. Rivers runs afoul of the authorities simply by being louché, becomes entangled with a beautiful spy named Hilary, and joins the French resistance, which is odd because the movie takes place in Germany.

Top Secret! exists basically to riff on various genre conventions and cinematic clichés, but the movie lives and dies on Kilmer’s performance, which he delivers with a pitch-perfect balance of arrogance, innocence, light bad-boy vibes, and irony. He knows how to land a one-liner, too, like this Jewish holiday joke, which only 10 percent of the audience probably got at the time, and even fewer now.

But Kilmer really shines in the movie’s numerous musical sequences. Not only can he sing, he exudes enough charisma that you could actually believe the entire female population of East Germany is trying to scream its way into his pants. The most famous sequence is his rendition of ‘Tutti Frutti’ in a post nightclub, but I actually love this ballad, where he seduces Hilary with an absolutely ridiculous parody of ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’

Unlike some piece on the Internets today, I didn’t know Val Kilmer. I never worked with him. I haven’t even seen all his movies. But I have seen Top Secret! dozens of times, and hope to see it a few dozen times before I die. Nick Rivers is a totally original comic creation in one of the best movie comedies, if not the absolute best, ever made. And only Val Kilmer could have played him.

RIP.