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Beverly Hills Cop
Retrospectives
- September 2003
USA, 1984. Directed by Martin Brest. Written
by Daniel Petrie, Jr.; from a story by Danilo Bach. Photographed by Bruce
Surtees. Edited by Arthur Coburn, Billy Weber. Music by Harold Faltermeyer.
Released by Paramount. 105 minutes.
Starring Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold, John
Ashton, Lisa Eilbacher, Ronny Cox, Steven Berkoff, James Russo, Jonathan
Banks, Gilbert R. Hill, Art Kimbro, Joel Bailey, Bronson Pinchot, Paul
Reiser.
It's
about a renegade detective who keeps getting chewed out by his captain for
pulling damn fool stunts. Who goes on a mission against all odds to tear
down a respected businessman, because he wants to expose him for being a
smuggler and get revenge for the murder of his best friend. Who is the centre
of a fish-out-of-water comedy, being a guy from Detroit trying to follow
his hunches and get around obstacles in the snazzy sun-baked world of
California.
"Beverly Hills Cop" was never a
movie with an original storyline. It was supposed to be a cookie-cutter project
for Sylvester Stallone, who only pulled out eight weeks before shooting,
when the studio decided he was doing too much script revision and calling
for action sequences that would cost more than they were willing to spend.
When the film's critics say that its developments are lifted from a thousand
other TV crime shows, they're right. But it is one of the great popular
entertainments of our time, a film that still has a place on the top 40 list
of American box-office champs, and continues to look slick and full of energy
almost twenty years after opening.
Some say it's confused, a movie with too much
grit and violence for a studio action comedy, which started an unwholesome
trend. They think that the murder of the main character's best friend is
too shocking for a picture that wants to make us laugh, and the shoot-out
at the end is another example of Hollywood throwing story threads to the
wind and resolving them with bullets. Or they say that it's a film where
we shouldn't be amused by the hero, because he's really just a loudmouthed
jackass. "We're cued to react to every stupid four-letter word as riotous,"
wrote Pauline Kael at the time. "With Murphy busting his sides laughing in
self-congratulation, and the camera jammed into his tonsils, damned if the
audience doesn't whoop and carry on as if, yes, this is a wow of a
comedy."
I think those complaints cancel each other out.
The movie is in form a shallow action thriller, and of course it wants to
shock us with images of Michigan mean streets and Mikey Tandino getting shot,
and carry on with its drugs-and-corruption plot as if nobody had seen anything
like that before. But it is this that gives Murphy an excuse for rolling
around the place, accusing desk clerks of racism to get a room and putting
bananas up the tailpipes of other cop cars. We've seen his best friend get
shot twice in the head, we saw the blood spray out and heard the hollow bullet
sound at the end of the corridor, and our sympathy is instinctively with
him as he does what it takes to get justice.
So the story is the background, giving Murphy
an excuse to outrageously riff over the surface. It has to be this kind of
story, and it has to work this way, because the screenplay doesn't often
go for a joke: The humour comes from mood and timing, from the specifics
of the way Axel Foley fools his way into office blocks, warehouses, private
clubs. Murphy gets to have a racial rant and do his homosexual impression,
but mostly he's quite simply lying his way past barriers. It's funny because
he does it so well, and creates the vicarious thrill of someone getting away
with something; it's involving because the objective is worthy, and we're
right along with it.
I realise this is all a very longwinded way of
saying that "Beverly Hills Cop" is a star vehicle, which gave Murphy a chance
to show off the rhythm of his standup routines at the same time as exercising
his acting chops, while a silly cop story worked under the flashy, funny
surface to manipulate the audience into submission. But it works better than
it has any right to, a sizzling combination of sheen and performance. The
soundtrack gave us songs like 'Neutron Dance' and 'New Attitude', and used
their poppy rhythms to give a feeling of freshness to car chases and gunplay;
it also had 'Axel F', the legendary melody by Harold Faltermeyer, which I
still hear played in clubs. The producers were Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer,
guys who insisted on heightened sound and visuals right from the beginning
of their career together, and had made "Flashdance" the year before. The
director was Martin Brest, a terrific, overlooked filmmaker, the man responsible
for "Going in Style", "Midnight Run" and "Scent of a Woman", who has a reputation
for cranking up combinations of comedy and sentiment, and being intelligent
with actors in roles large and small.
You can see that reputation borne out here, in
scenes that should have been functional, like those where Axel keeps finding
himself in the Beverly Hills police station. The screenplay purpose of those
moments is to get story points across in large blocks of dialogue and demonstrate
what thin ice the hero is skating on. In effect, glances and dynamics suggest
relationships that are never spoken about: Ronny Cox plays Lt. Bogomil, a
by-the-book guy who doesn't want some Detroit hustler ruining his town. His
lines suggest a relationship of simple antagonism, but Cox makes Bogomil
a good man, sympathetic to the cause, amused by and respectful of this kid's
determination. Axel and Taggart (John Ashton) do nothing but second-guess
each other, and yet there's a feeling that they're both tough guys, ribbing
each other because they're testing each other's differing approaches to the
job. Judge Reinhold plays Billy, the dopey-eyed innocent who looks up to
Axel -- he has some of the funniest scenes, bickering with Taggart like a
tut-tutting wife, and nervously running into Serge (Bronson Pinchot), the
art gallery attendant whose manner cannot quite be put into
words.
But enough of this minutiae. It looks like I'm
scrambling for evidence to apologise for the movie. What's wrong with a good
star vehicle? "Beverly Hills Cop" is wonderful because it has confidence
in every fibre of its look, sound and feel, and because it's about Eddie
Murphy slinking around, rebelliously managing to sneak past stuff and outsmart
bad guys. He was 23 when he made the movie, a rising star about to explode.
It was his third leading role after "48 Hrs." and "Trading Places", and it
combined the tough street smarts of the first one with the silly tomfoolery
of the second. It was before you could accuse Murphy of being overfamiliar
or bloated by celebrity. He was at his peak, doing what he'd been waiting
to do since he was a wisecracking teenager, enthused by a wave of public
support. On fire.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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