The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20130730072632/http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1991-07-07/features/9101240994_1_drebin-police-squad-leslie-nielsen

Gunning For A Laugh

July 7, 1991|By CLIFFORD TERRY, Special to the Sun-Sentinel

Standing in the back of an elevator in an elegant Chicago hotel, Leslie Nielsen -- who is known for carrying his personal whoopee cushion on his travels -- unleashes a few choice flatulent noises just as a stylish, prim- looking woman steps into the car. To her credit, she handles it well.

The prank is fitting. In the past several years, Nielsen -- onetime paragon of sternness -- has been taking a fuzzy-pink-slippers performance path that would best be described as ``silly.`` Like the drum-banging rabbit he mimics in the beer commercial, his career just keeps going and going and going.

```Silly` would be a good word,`` the mellow-voiced actor agrees as he sits in a corner of the hotel`s deserted restaurant, where one of the coffee- toting staff members has just -- as if on cue -- spilled cream all over the table, prompting Nielsen to taunt her with a ``na-na-na-NA-na.``

``Yeah, `silly` is good. And `lucky.` I feel very lucky to have the license to do dumb and stupid things that are really wonderful -- to do all those things that your parents wouldn`t let you do as a kid. I just love the humor because it`s very much a part of my humor. I love trying to find the epitome of dumbness in people. I used to think I had to go to great pains to find it, but I`ve discovered recently that it`s always been totally right there on the surface.``

Primarily known for playing no-nonsense cops on TV shows such as The New Breed and The Protectors, Nielsen, 65, first went the deadpan-comedy route 11 years ago when he was cast as the dippy doctor in the disaster-movie parody Airplane! Since then, he has played Police Lt. Frank Drebin in the snappy but short-lived TV series Police Squad, its 1988 big-screen hit reincarnation The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! and now Naked Gun 1/2: The Smell of Fear.

In the first few moments of Naked Gun 2 1/2 -- a rambunctious mixture of juvenile sight gags, dopey one-liners and sophomoric sexual sniggering, along with a story line of sorts that involves an effort to sabotage U.S. energy policy -- Drebin is being honored at a banquet for shooting his 1,000th drug dealer. Right off, entering the room, he slams the door in the face of an actress who is a Barbara Bush look-alike. Then, busily dismantling a huge lobster, he plops a lemon wedge onto the turban of an actress resembling Winnie Mandela. You were maybe expecting The Magnificent Ambersons?

Drebin, who comes complete with a .44 Magnum and perhaps a 45 IQ, already has been compared to Peter Sellers` bumbling Inspector Clouseau -- which Nielsen finds flattering but inaccurate. ``Clouseau was more of a caricature, and Drebin is a cartoon.``

Through most of his scenes, Nielsen gives his character a certain look (supplemented by sideward glances), as if he just doesn`t get it -- which, mostly, he doesn`t. ``The way I play him is to always be looking in the other direction, instead of the way he should be looking. As an actor, I`m always finding a way to be oblivious, unaware. It`s very subtle, but extremely important.``

Underneath the frivolity, Naked Gun 2 1/2 makes a few points about the ecology (as well as the future of the Democratic party and the prospect of a President Dan Quayle). ``David (writer-director Zucker) has been very much involved with the environment and is very aware that doing something like this can have an impact,`` Nielsen says. ``If you can spread that concern through the film without ramming it down somebody`s throat, and treat it with humor and zaniness, I think it will become a most effective message.

``Like, at the end of the movie, Frank tells President Bush: `I used to think that blowing away a fleeing suspect with my .44 Magnum was everything. Who wouldn`t? But now I want to be known as the environmental police lieutenant. I want to have a world where Frank Jr. and all the Frank Jrs. sit under a shade tree, breathe the air, swim in the ocean or go into a 7-Eleven without an interpreter. I want a world that doesn`t need Ed Asner and Valerie Harper, where you can eat a sea otter without getting sick, where kids won`t be named Tiffany and Jason.```

One of three boys (his older brother Eric is a former Canadian deputy prime minister), Leslie Nielsen spent his early years in the Yukon close to the Arctic Circle in the settlement of Fort Norman, where his father was a Royal Canadian Mountie. (``What I remember are those winters. We`d go 2 1/2 months with the temperature 40 below or lower. But we didn`t know any differently. We figured it was that way in Palm Beach, too.``)

After graduating from high school in Edmonton and serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, he began his show-business career at a Calgary radio station and later studied in New York at such fabled places as the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Actors` Studio. In 1949, he became part of television`s ``Golden Age,`` acting in hundreds of live programs (for $100 or $150) on such series as Studio One. He made his movie debut in 1954 in The Vagabond King.

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