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Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather continue their occasional series of paging through the program thumbnails on HBO Max and stopping on something that looks interesting. This time, it’s Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop, which we analyze as a Shakespearean tragi-comedy, which it isn’t not. Like a lot of these older movies we’re watching, it’s pretty interesting how it exceeds expectations: it’s is what you think and a little bit more.
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Since the scale of the character theme came up, it reminds me that I was conned into signing up to play violin around the time the theme permeated the culture (probably around one of the sequels), and we were supposed to play the theme at one of the concerts as the big showstopping number. That…turned out to be too ambitious and we had to scramble to learn something else at the last minute.
Oh, and I also don’t remember affectionate behavior between men in the ’70s and ’80s. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was added by Murphy. I notice that the original vision of Axel was Sylvester Stallone, who rewrote the script and was asked to leave because that action movie was too expensive. So getting Murphy in and making it more idealistic seems like a strong possibility.