Favourite Movie Scenes #5: Naked Gun 3, The Opening Dream Sequence

I'm stretching the term "favourite" more and more with each one of these posts, but here goes anyway...

Recently, I've been watching the original Naked Gun trilogy, since they're all on Amazon Prime at at the moment. I started with the third, since it's actually my favourite, despite getting the worst reviews. (But in all honesty I think they're all much of a muchness.)

There are so many brilliant scenes in the trilogy that there's something a bit arbitrary about choosing one, but it's hard to beat this one. I've always seen it described as a spoof of two different scenes, from The Untouchables and Battleship Potemkin. I've never actually seen The Untouchables. I did watch Battleship Potemkin many years ago, and found it so boring I was literally falling asleep.

The scene is funny even if you don't know what it's spoofing, though.

My favourite moments in the scene:

1) When Frank Drebbin runs out of bullets in his gun, but in the next shot suddenly has a machine gun instead. (Since it's a dream sequence, this is quite realistic.)

2) "Look! It's disgruntled postal workers!" (You may not get this if you didn't live through the nineties. If so, do an internet search for "going postal".)

3) Norberg catching the falling babies and doing a victory dance.

4) The sudden appearance of the President and the Pope, along with their entourages, who both just happen to be walking down the steps of the train station at the same time.

The fact that the scene is beautifully shot (quite a set-piece, in fact) is in character for the trilogy. The brilliance of the Naked Gun films is that they combined the silliest, most throwaway humour with such high production values. The viewer's brain is engaged on two tracks: the humour, and the underlying story which you can't help taking seriously on some semi-conscious level.

These films seemed to constantly be on television when I was a kid, and into my teens. I laughed at them but I never thought of them as classics. I do now. They all get the maximum of five stars in my "movie seen" spreadsheet, an honour restricted to only twenty-eight films out of 1380.

I went to see the recent remake in the cinema. It was surprisingly excellent, refreshingly non-woke, and fully in the spirit of the original trilogy. But not quite up to their standard.

One final thing: I've always loved the phrase "dream sequence", and hearing film critics talk about "the dream sequence". It seems so portentous.