This Is *Not* Mel Tormé
Val Kilmer (1959-2025)
Twenty-odd minutes in, the World War II/Elvis movie spoof Top Secret!1 hits a long (ish, by the standard of its stick-and-move joke-a-minute pacing) sequence in the dining room of East Germany’s posh Hotel Geschluffen2, bringing hero and heroine together.
Nick Rivers (Val Kilmer) is an American rock star participating in a cultural festival; Hillary Flammond (Lucy Gutteridge), is a member of the resistance and “the daughter of a kidnapped scientist”3, who’s just sneaked into the ballroom to evade the secret police. Seeing that Hillary can’t get past the maître d’, Nick swoops in, pretends she’s his date, and leads her onto the dance floor for a ridiculously baroque bergamask.
It’s a twist on what TVTropes labels a “Funny Background Event”4 - Nick and Hillary’s spiky expository dialogue continues unbroken while they (and the rest of the dance floor) perform a choreographed series of synchronized shtick. Only in the final moments does the dialogue pause long enough to let the music crescendo and allow us to focus on the dance’s ludicrous physicality.
After a brief dialogue break - monolingual Nick leaves it to Hillary to deal with the German-speaking waiter for a few subtitle gags and a bit more Yiddish peppered in5 - before unwittingly swiping the spotlight from a visiting opera singer to take the stage for a command performance. Handing out sheet music to the tuxedoed orchestra, he then launches into a tour de force rendition of “Tutti Frutti.”
After a few dropped monocles, the entire restaurant full of alter kockers6 are dancing in their seats, and if this feels to you like the same overall beat as Marty McFly “inventing” rock n’ roll, you’re not alone. The whole sequence plays like a slightly heightened, calculated send-up of a contemporary pop culture moment, except for a few small, important differences:
Kilmer does his own singing
Top Secret! came out more than a year before Back to the Future
In hindsight, this one-two punch of musical comedy numbers (two of several across the movie’s runtime) serves as a sales pitch of the range of the movie’s star, Val Kilmer, here in his movie debut. His courtly-scarecrow physicality in the former number and lanky Elvis7 gyrations in the latter are perfect showcases of this bizarre contradiction of a leading man. That he’s a movie star is self-evident from the jump; what use to put him to was a bit less clear, and was a space that Kilmer energetically surveyed for the rest of his career.
Val Kilmer died yesterday of pneumonia and, for a generation of moviegoers8, leaves behind a paradoxical filmography; almost no two roles overlap, or even make sense to be portrayed by the same performer, unless you factor in, elliptically, that that performer is Val Kilmer.
Kilmer was one of those performers - like Jeff Bridges before him, and, one could argue, Chris Pine or Robert Pattinson after him - with the heart, soul and chops of a character actor that accidentally got uploaded at the factory into the body of a Nordic Superhero Leading Man.
Kilmer’s great strength was using his stardom and success to turn around and pick increasingly far-flung projects, which in turn allowed him to explore and experiment with his own range.
Tall and angular in youth, broad-shouldered and bullish as he aged, Kilmer was a great pairing of physical agility (his oft-repeated trick of rolling a coin or a pen or a drumstick through his fingers) and seemingly contradictory features in a face capable of narrow-eyed iciness or broad, full-body guffaws.
I remember my aunt mentioning that Kilmer was in Top Gun9 - based on Top Secret! and 1985’s hilarious and morally-incisive Real Genius10 - assumed he would be The Funny Pilot, and not the American Aryan Red Baron, delighting in his own supremacy with the gusto of a Karate Kid villain, while confusing the impulses of classmate and competitor, Tom Cruise’s Maverick.
Returning as Iceman 36 years later in Top Gun: Maverick11, Kilmer pivots to a cameo as Maverick’s benefactor, confessor, and closest friend, cutting an altogether different and tragic figure from 1986’s young buck - Kilmer, older and larger, gives a largely silent performance, robbed of his voice by the throat cancer he survived in the 2010s. It’s a strong counterpoint to Cruise’s Peter Pan act, lending the movie the heft of the intervening decades and their real costs.
Real Genius, by the way, manages to split the tone of WarGames and Weird Science, while having a more serious philosophical message than either. Essentially, it’s a feature-length argument for why STEM education should require a counterbalance in the Humanities. It’s also a gorgeously-shot12 artifact of an era when comedies used production value to combat the rising popularity of home video by giving audiences a reason to see them on the big-screen. Kilmer’s party-animal genius Chris Knight manages to be both leading man and Puckish supporting player in the same movie.
In a sensible timeline, his dramatic/comedic turn as knight errant/Aragorn manqué Madmartigan in Willow13 would have emerged as the new Han Solo, but the movie underperformed even while Kilmer did anything but.
Kilmer’s embodiment of Jim Morrison comes closer to getting me on board with either The Doors or The Doors14 - a band and movie that I keep giving second chances to without much to show for it - than anybody this side of Apocalypse Now.
1993 brings two indelible performances from the Kilmer canon: first as the gold lamé clad “Mentor” in True Romance1516 where he captures The King’s energy and physicality (even while largely cropped or out-of-focus) so perfectly that only in peak moments does Austin Butler’s Elvis (2022) rise to Kilmer’s performance; and second as Tombstone17’s Doc Holliday - the alcoholic, tubercular Southern Dandy counterpoint to Kurt Russell’s boy scout-ish Wyatt Earp. Kilmer steals the movie from a murderer’s row of scene-stealers18 in the first, most concrete argument of his career for a Best Supporting Actor nomination deferred/denied.19 Kilmer’s Holliday is acidic, heartfelt, wry, pompous, vulnerable, bold, and wounded, either by turn or all at once - a bravura turn that, in anyone else’s hands, could have deflated the movie; instead, Kilmer gives the movie its spine.
1995 brought Kilmer’s arguably most frivolous and most serious roles, back to back: filling Michael Keaton’s vacated cowl in Batman Forever20 in June, and as Chris Shiherlis in Heat21 that December. Stirred into the haterade the Schumacher era only partially deserves, Kilmer’s Bruce Wayne tends to get overlooked in the lexicon, but he sets the precedent for aloof weirdo Batmen to come. We meet the taciturn-yet-volatile Shiherlis as possibly the least in-control member of thief Neil MacCauley (Robert DeNiro)’s crew, later to learn that he’s the only member of the crew with the strength to live up to MacCauley’s bushido code while there’s still time to save himself.
Kilmer’s late 90s work would feel like dissipating momentum in the filmography of a more conventional star, following his one-and-done Batman turn with The Ghost and the Darkness22 and The Island of Dr. Moreau23 in 1996 - the former, a pretty good man-v-lion thriller, the latter a legendary catastrophe - and the un-fun spy caper reboot The Saint24 in ‘97.
But Kilmer was never the weak link in his movies; a Val Kilmer movie can be bad, but in all likelihood, not because of Val Kilmer.
The 21st Century brought a bit of trial and error - a painfully underproduced David Mamet thriller, Spartan25 is nonetheless anchored by Kilmer’s riveting central performance, sparring with the likes of Ed O’Neill, Clark Gregg, William H. Macy and Kristen Bell; a soulful turn in The Salton Sea26, a movie I will one day finish, honest - before what, to my mind, was Kilmer’s last truly great performance:
Gay Perry, in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang27.
I’ve spoken elsewhere about how my favorite subgenre is Loser Noir28, and Kiss Kiss is an exemplar of the form, with Kilmer’s slick, supercilious Perry as the perfect, tried-patience foil to Comeback Kid Robert Downey, Jr.’s hyperverbal, unprincipled Harry Lockhart. Under the equally-heavy hitter combo of writer/director Shane Black and producer Joel Silver, Kilmer and Downey, Jr., give off such heat, it’s enough to make you furious these two 80s Kings had never teamed up before, nor ever would again. (No shade on Paul Bettany, but the idea of Kilmer as the voice of J.A.R.V.I.S. sniping at star-mode Downey, Jr.’s Tony Stark is a tantalizing road-not-taken thought experiment.)
The closest we got to a reunion was Black’s spiritual follow-up, The Nice Guys29, which featured a performer30 of similar stature to the figure that late-period Kilmer cut playing an attorney named Perry, and Kilmer’s son Jack as Chet, the dull-eyed “projectionalist.”
For a performer I can write almost 2K words on in a morning pages sesh, there are far too many of his movies I haven’t caught, and now that his filmography is finite - even while its range is near-infinite - I’ve got some catching up to do.
I hope you will too, because we’ve lost a giant. The way I can tell there will never be another Val Kilmer is that, even while we still had the one Val Kilmer, there wasn’t anyone else like him.
W/D: Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, David Zucker; Paramount Pictures, 1984; streaming on PlutoTV as of this writing
Itself one of a dozen throwaway Yiddish-language jokes, adding to the movie’s Borscht Belt yukfest feel.
I know, it all sounds like some bad movie.
Men in Black’s K bracing an alien fleeing Earth close to camera as, behind them, J struggles to help deliver a tentacled alien baby; Ruthless People’s Walters and Bender having an all’s well that ends well dialogue now that kidnap victim Barbara Stone’s been returned to her husband Sam as, behind them, Barbara beats the shit out of complicit Sam and kicks his ass off the Santa Monica Pier.; later in Top Secret!, Hillary and Nick have a park bench conversation as, in the background, humans fly in to shit on a giant statue of a pigeon.
Kids, ask your grandparents what “Gey kokn afn yam" and “Geh klop kop af vant" mean.
See, I can pepper in Yiddish, too.
Nearly a full decade before Tony Scott did the right thing and cast Kilmer as The King.
Read: mine
Dir.: Tony Scott; W.: Jim Cash, Jack Epps, Jr., Ehud Yonay; Paramount/Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer, 1986.
Dir.: Martha Coolidge; Story: Neal Israel, Pat Proft; Screenplay: Neal Israel, Pat Proft, Peter Torokvei; Tri-Star/Brian Grazer Productions, 1985.
Dir.: Joseph Kosinski; Story: Peter Craig, Justin Marks; Screenplay: Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Christopher McQuarrie; Paramount/Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer, 2022.
By Vilmos Zsigmond, of all people.
Dir.: Ron Howard; W: Bob Dolman, George Lucas; MGM/LucasFilm/Imagine, 1988.
Dir. Oliver Stone; W.: Randall Jahnson, Oliver Stone; Carolco/Imagine, 1991.
Dir. Tony Scott; W.: Quentin Tarantino; Warner Bros./Morgan Creek Entertainment, 1993; Kilmer’s second team-up with Tony Scott, before reuniting on 2006’s Déja Vu.
To date, the most literal manifestation of screenwriter Quentin Tarantino’s Elvis Presley fixation
Dir: George Pan Cosmatos, Kurt Russell (uncredited); W: Kevin Jarre; Hollywood Pictures/Cinergi, 1993
Russell, Bill Paxton, Sam Elliott, Powers Boothe, Michael Rooker, Stephen Lang, Michael Biehn, Billy Zane, Thomas Haden Church
In fairness, that was the year Tommy Lee Jones won for The Fugitive, beating Ralph Fiennes for Schindler’s List and John Malkovich for In the Line of Fire, so a stacked year for a characteristically stacked category, to be sure.
Dir.: Joel Schumacher; W: Akiva Goldsman, Janet Scott Batchler, Lee Batchler; Warner Bros., 1995
W/D: Michael Mann; Warner Bros./Regency Enterprises, 1995
Dir: Stephen Hopkins; W: William Goldman; Paramount, 1996.
Dir: John Frankenheimer, Richard Stanley; Story: H.G. Welles; Screenplay: Richard Stanley, Ron Hutchinson; New Line Cinema, 1996.
Dir: Philip Noyce; W: Jonathan Hensleigh, Wesley Strick; Paramount, 1997.
W/D: David Mamet; Warner Bros./Franchise Pictures, 2004
Dir: DJ Caruso; W: Tony Gayton; Warner Bros./Castle Rock Entertainment, 2002
W/D: Shane Black; Warner Bros./Silver Pictures, 2005.
Keep it here for a dedicated post on the subject sometime.
Dir: Shane Black; W: Shane Black, Anthony Bagarozzi; Warner Bros./Silver Pictures, 2016
I won’t mention the performer’s name, since he was subsequently registered as a sex offender after being hit with some pretty wretched allegations.