Authors: Hadley Freeman
Murphy has said that the reason his eighties movie characters feel so real is because ‘From the very beginning, I always tried to make dialogue flow comfortably, I always did that to make it seem more authentic.’ However, he barely improvised in
Trading Places
. Even the scene when he pretends to be a blind Vietnam vet, which feels so much like a Murphy riff, was ‘all on paper’: ‘
Trading Places
, John Landis movies, period – it looks like a bunch of improvisation, but John Landis is on you more than any other director I’ve ever worked with. He’ll tell you how to read the line, and if he wants you to do a physical stunt, he’ll show you. He really gets in there and you’re like, “This motherfucker,”’ Murphy said.
Landis laughs at this: ‘Well that’s not exactly true, Eddie does improvise. I’m pretty specific, but there were times when we did improvise. One of my favourite lines in the movie was improvised. In the script [in that scene] when he’s hassling the woman he says, “Once you’ve had a man with no legs there’s no going back. We can make it, baby, me and you.” But I just let the camera keep rolling and he then shouts out, “Ain’t you never seen
Porgy and Bess
? Bitch!” That was Eddie.’
During all this, Murphy was still making
SNL
. ‘I only had Eddie three days a week, because of
Saturday Night Live
, just like I’d only had Belushi two days a week when we were making
Animal House
,’ says Landis. But this would soon not be the case.
48 Hours
came out when they were still shooting
Trading Places
and audiences went insane for Murphy. When
Trading Places
came out in the summer of 1983, it was clear that Murphy was a star, and about five minutes after it arrived in cinemas, he quit
Saturday Night Live
, and it was at this point that Murphy began to transcend race.
Mickey Rourke was the first prospective Axel Foley, but he dropped out. He was then followed by (good Lord) Sylvester Stallone, who rewrote the script as a straight action movie, but he left the project two weeks before filming and made
Cobra
instead. So Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson quickly hired Eddie Murphy for the role, and, in doing so, made the film the biggest hit of 1984 and one of the biggest hits of all time. Murphy is at his absolute comic prime in the film: in the scene in which he bluffs his way into getting a room at a swish Beverly Hills hotel, he goes from sweet to exaggeratedly angry to deadpan in the space of two minutes without even moving his body, and his reaction to being told the price of a room at the hotel remains one of the coolest double-takes ever committed to film. Few actors – comic or otherwise – can convey so subtly so many conflicting emotions on their face, in this case, shock, trying not to look shocked and a growing hysteria about being in Beverly Hills.
He stuck in one or two jokes about his race in the movie, including in the hotel scene, but otherwise there is hardly any reference to it whatsoever, which seems both sweetly innocent and frankly incredible considering this is a movie about a black guy running around Los Angeles in the eighties with a gun. Yes, Foley is supposed to be an outsider in Beverly Hills but, according to the script, it’s the fact that he’s from Detroit that signifies his interloper status, not his race, although Murphy’s race does compound that impression (it’s notable that the only other black person in the movie is Foley’s boss back in Detroit. Is everyone in Beverly Hills white?
fn17
). For the first time in his career, Murphy’s race did not define his character, and that this was allowed to happen is a testament to Murphy’s superstardom, and Bruckheimer and Simpson’s forward thinking.
fn18
Whereas in
48 Hours
the black character is very much second-in-command to the white cop, in
Beverly Hills Cop
Axel is the leader of the pack of white cops, who don’t just rely on him to catch the bad guys, they need him to show them how to behave in a bar. This wasn’t just the first time a black cop was depicted as being both professionally and socially superior to his white colleagues – it is the only time, until
Training Day
(2001), in which Denzel Washington is in charge of Ethan Hawke, and even in that film Hawke eventually triumphs over Washington. ‘There’s this little box that African-American actors have to work in, in the first place,’ said Murphy. ‘And I was able to rise above it.’
But even in
Beverly Hills Cop
, there was a notable restriction placed on Murphy: his onscreen romance. The only woman in the film is Jenny (Lisa Eilbacher), who is white. When Stallone rewrote the script, Axel and Jenny are romantically involved, which completely makes sense in the universe of the film. But in the version shot with Murphy, Axel seems utterly oblivious to Lisa, even though the character keeps throwing herself at him, reclining on his bed, following him on stake-outs for no reason whatsoever other than to be annoying in that way only women in male-led action films ever are. There is no need for Lisa to be in this movie – she serves less than zero function – and while I don’t mean to suggest that if a woman is in an action movie then the least she can do is sleep with the male lead, that is nonetheless very clearly why she was in the story in the first place. But because Murphy is black and Lisa is white (to have cast a black actress as well as a black lead would have made this mainstream action movie ‘too black’, presumably), no romance can happen between them.
Instead, in both
Beverly Hills Cop
and its 1987 sequel, Axel is rendered completely asexual, and deliberately oblivious to white women, even when one of those white women is Brigitte Nielsen, for God’s sake. This is to makes him seem ‘safe’ to white audiences, especially white male audiences: ‘See, this isn’t one of THOSE kind of black guys – this is a good black guy! Sure, he’s fun and knows where all the strip clubs in town are, but he’s also the kind you can trust not to touch a white woman, even if she’s lolling across a bed when alone in a hotel room with him!’ the movies say.
In this regard, Axel is pretty much the opposite of the image Murphy went out of his way to portray in the hugely successful films of his stand-up that sandwich the decade,
Delirious
(1983) and
Raw
(1987), in which he prowls around the stage in head-to-toe leather: ‘If I took Brooke Shields to the Grammy’s, y’all would lose your mind,’ he riffs in
Raw
. ‘Because y’all know Brooke would get fucked that night.’
The few love interests Murphy is allowed onscreen are black women,
fn19
and audiences are never allowed to see them actually having sex, from
48 Hours
to
Coming to America
. In Murphy’s film after
Beverly Hills Cop
,
The Golden Child
, he is allowed to kiss a ‘Tibetan’ woman onscreen (actually played by the Chilean-Iraqi-Irish actress Charlotte Lewis, but not strictly Caucasian, and that’s all that matters here), but no more. Even in the last scene of
Trading Places
, when Billy Ray, Louis, Ophelia and Coleman have escaped to an unidentified paradise island, Coleman’s girlfriend appears to be Tahitian and an island native, which makes sense, but Billy Ray’s girlfriend is definitely, pointedly black. It’s not that I’m so desperate to see Murphy have sex onscreen (and as anyone who has seen 1992’s
Boomerang
knows, Murphy’s enthusiasm in a sex scene can make a little go a very long way), or to see him hook up with a white woman. But it’s pretty extraordinary to see how nervy eighties filmmakers were about letting a young, attractive black man onscreen seem in any way sexual to mainstream white audiences. Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, hell, even Dan Aykroyd were allowed to have onscreen sex lives in the eighties – but not Murphy.
The Golden Child
is the second film in which Murphy’s race is irrelevant to the character. There is absolutely no reason why Chandler Jarrell, private investigator for lost children, should be black, and there is no reference to it in the film. Murphy proved by now he had transcended race, an achievement that would feel a little more triumphant if Murphy didn’t look quite so bored onscreen during the whole of this movie. Although, to be fair, this is a ridiculous movie, a shameless rip-off of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
and one that makes so little sense it’s like watching a film that was dubbed into a foreign language and then redubbed into English. Although it’s not quite as ridiculous as the hat Murphy wears for the whole film.
Murphy was by now one of the biggest superstars alive. He was so popular, in fact, he was able to release the delightfully stupid single ‘Party All the Time’ in 1985, with an extraordinarily be-weaved Rick James – and it still reached number two in the Billboard chart, denied the top spot by Lionel Ritchie’s ‘Say You, Say Me’. (Britain, rather commendably, was a bit harder to impress and Murphy only got to eighty-five in the UK charts. Well done, Britain.) The man believed he could do anything, and American audiences agreed. But times were about to change, again.
Murphy’s feelings about having a social responsibility as a black actor have never been that hard to fathom: he’s resented it. ‘I know because of the level of my celebrity I have been forced – I am being forced – to be a politician in a manner of speaking. And what happens, although I know I have a responsibility politically, ultimately I am an entertainer, I am an artist first and foremost. And you accept the responsibility, but the artist part of you resents the fact they don’t just give you the freedom to just be an artist,’ he said in 1990.
Murphy was very aware that he was the successful ‘black guy’ in Hollywood, and with that came the awareness that in order to maintain his position, and to keep transcending race, he had – to a certain extent – to play along.
Which is not to say he didn’t occasionally speak up – but, unlike Richard Pryor or, later, Spike Lee, he would do so with a smile on his face so some people might miss the punch. In 1988 he presented the Best Film Award at the Oscars and when he got up onstage he told a palpably confused audience that he initially declined the offer to present because the Academy ‘haven’t recognised black people in the motion pictures … Throughout sixty years Hattie McDaniel won the first [Oscar], Sidney Poitier won one and Lou Gossett won one.’
He paused a little at this point, as though going off script: ‘I’ll probably never win an Oscar for saying this but, hey, what the hey I gotta say it!’ He shrugged with a laugh. ‘Actually, that might not be any trouble because the way it’s going we only get one every twenty years so we ain’t due until 2004 so by this time this will have all blown over.’
fn20
But, he said onstage, his agent said, ‘You can’t snub the Academy.’ So he went, even though he believed that ‘black people [were still made] to bring up the rear of society’. If he hadn’t come, then he simply would have been absent, but this way at least they noticed his speech.
‘I don’t think you can beat the system,’ Murphy said two years later. ‘I think you can be successful within the system.’
He argued with Spike Lee, who criticised him for not insisting on having more black actors and crew members in his movies. Murphy felt, probably rightly, that if he took this stand his career in the studio system would be jeopardised and then there would be no black actors in the mainstream A-list in Hollywood at all. ‘The scariest thing about you to me,’ he said to Lee, ‘is that every black person who really stood up and said, “Fuck it, I’m about this,” got dissed, filled, fucked over – everybody from Dr King to Ali, you know?’
But things were shifting in African-American film with the rise of the independent industry. By the late 1980s, Spike Lee had released
She’s Gotta Have It
and was making
School Daze
, two independent movies emphatically about African-Americans and African-American experiences. Murphy, however, felt, ‘I am very black and I have a very strong black consciousness, but I am about gradual change and dialogue that is much more civil.’ What this meant was not making an assertively black film, but a big glossy Hollywood movie that happened to feature African-Americans. Succeeding within the system, in other words.
‘Eddie called me up and had this idea about an African prince who has an arranged marriage, but didn’t want it. So he comes to the United States to find a liberated woman of his equal,’ says Landis. ‘He really had no story other than that, and so I went home and told my wife, and she got incredibly excited. She said, “John, don’t you understand? It’s Cinderella! It’s Sleeping Beauty! It’s a fucking fairy tale – from Africa!”’
fn21
Landis started to plan the story about an African prince, Akeem (Murphy), who, along with his best friend Semmi (Arsenio Hall), comes to America to find his bride. He heads to – where else? – Queens, where he works in a fast food restaurant, McDowell’s, and falls in love with the owner’s daughter while pretending to be a pauper. The film includes still hysterically funny and knowing references to African-American culture, including the advertisements for ‘Soul-Glo’, a horrible product that makes Afro hair shimmer, and god-awful black soul singers fronting bands with names like ‘Sexual Chocolate’. It also gave roles to established African-American actors, such as James Earl Jones, and launched a then totally unknown Samuel L. Jackson.
‘As I planned the story, I got very excited, but for reasons I wouldn’t discuss for twenty years,’ says Landis. ‘I suddenly realised, “The plot will have nothing to do with their colour!” So it was essentially a black movie but it’s not – it’s not about their colour, it’s a fairy tale. It’s a romantic comedy, and the storytelling itself is very conservative and traditional, and it looks like a traditional Hollywood movie – these were all my intentions. It’s the movie of mine that made the most money. Around the world, it’s made almost $1billion. It was a huge hit, and, importantly, a huge international hit. But the great success of that movie is that it’s an African-American movie and people don’t really notice, and that’s very satisfying to me.’