This Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker comedy is second only to Airplane for sheer unbridled lunacy. It's actually based on their television series Police Squad! -- itself a parody of Dragnet. It lasted only six episodes but remains a cult favorite. Television wasn't ready for this kind of craziness, I guess.

Leslie Nielsen, who built the second act of his career on this kind of film, started hamming it up as the Naked Gun series went on, which diluted much of the humor. Here in the original, he seems to know what Buster Keaton learned in his early days in vaudeville as a child: take a pratfall with a stone face, and we laugh that much harder.