Defending (Not Defunding) the Police in “Beverly Hills Cop”

We’ve just passed the one-year anniversary of the death of George Floyd. Floyd’s murder under the knee of a Minneapolis cop has rightly led to impassioned public discourse about the role of policing in African-American communities. It’s no accident, at this particular moment in history, that so many of our major recent films – like Judas and the Black Messiah – have had something to say about the fraught connection between law enforcement and America’s Black citizenry. On television, such powerful shows as 2019’s When They See Us miniseries have zeroed in on the police role in demonizing innocent people of color.

 But on the anniversary of Floyd’s death I yearned to watch something a bit lighter. Which is how I happened to queue up my TV to an oldie, 1984’s Beverly Hills Cop. The film has everything to do with the outrageous charms of Eddie Murphy, in the leading role of Axel Foley. But this was not a case (like Coming to America) of the film being a Murphy product from the start. It began as an action thriller that at one time was supposed to star Mickey Rourke. When Sylvester Stallone came aboard, the blood quotient was ramped up, and so was the budget. But then producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer made a major pivot to Eddie Murphy, who’d done well with comedies like 48 Hours and Trading Places. Suddenly the script’s renegade cop was not only a brilliant but independent-minded detective but also a major wise-ass, with a foul-mouthed quip for every occasion. The end result is an undercover police officer from a grungy Detroit precinct who shows up in Beverly Hills, supposedly on vacation but really to search (over the objections of his superiors) for the man behind the killing of a childhood buddy.

 Beverly Hills plays itself, in all of its SoCal patrician glory. As someone who grew up in neighboring West L.A., just over the city line, I can attest to the authenticity of the Spanish-inflected civic buildings, the swanky boutiques, and the hordes of well-tanned sidewalk strollers, all of them dressed to impress. (It’s amusing, though, to see Foley enter the Beverly Wilshire Hotel—a distinguished hostelry in the heart of Beverly Hills—and then cross the lobby of Downtown L.A.’s equally historic Biltmore, where he cons a desk clerk into giving him a suite for the price of a single room.)

 Critics as well as audiences loved Murphy’s live-wire performance. In Time magazine, critic Richard Schickel wrote that Murphy “exuded the kind of cheeky, cocky charm that has been missing from the screen since [Jimmy] Cagney was a pup, snarling his way out of the ghetto."  Cagney, of course, scored big in the 1930s as an overgrown dead-end kid, one whose bravado exceeded even his talent for larceny. Murphy may be on the right side of the law, but he violates local rules and mores at every turn. In the oh-so-polite Beverly Hills police station, he pummels codes of conduct non-stop. As Schickel notes, he’s “ghetto” in his sassy rejection of the status quo . . . but there’s absolutely no overt racism to be seen in the way he’s approached either by fellow cops or civilians. Some of them may not like him much, but no one says (or even THINKS) the “N word.” And by the ending, of course, everyone but the bad guys is thoroughly on his side. Welcome to Neverneverland!

 A word in passing on Eddy Donno, whose spectacular driving in the film won him a Stuntman Award. Well-deserved, and a big step up from his Roger Corman days.  

Beverly Hills Ballot-Box Ballyhoo

Growing up in the West Los Angeles subdivision known as Beverlywood, I developed a certain perspective on Beverly Hills.  (For the record, I was called Beverly long before I moved into the area, though I’m sure my parents were not ignorant of the name’s associations with ritzy SoCal enclaves.)  As an L.A. girl who lived just a few short blocks from the Beverly Hills border, I developed mixed emotions about the little city to the north. Yes, it was fun to stroll up Beverwil Drive and find myself among charming cafes and chic boutiques. I remember star-sightings over lunch at the Hamburger Hamlet and yummy ice cream cones at Wil Wright’s.

On the other hand, kids like me had to deal with the snobbery of our north-of-the-border peers. They told us in no uncertain terms that their public schools were much better than ours. I was informed that the A’s I earned at LA.’s Canfield Elementary School would be mere B’s and C’s in Beverly Hills, since their standards were so much higher. Those memories have shaped my feelings about Beverly Hills ever since.

Still, I liked seeing Donald O’Connor pushing his cart in the supermarket, Zsa Zsa Gabor nibbling on pastry at Blum’s, and Sammy Davis Jr. driving his Excalibur through the tree-lined streets of Beverly Hills. And I remember the day in 1960 the city celebrated the installation of an odd little sculpture at the intersection of Olympic Blvd. and Beverly Drive. This so-called Celluloid Monument honors Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Will Rogers, and other Hollywood personalities who fought  to preserve the autonomy of Beverly Hills when it was on the brink of being swallowed up by the city of Los Angeles.

One big issue at the time was the allocation of drinking water, always a major concern in dusty, drought-prone Southern California. Another, of course, was power politics. Nancie Clare’s engaging The Battle for Beverly Hills lays it all out for us, making clear why the survival of one small California city has lessons for us today. Her subtitle, “A City’s Independence and the Birth of Celebrity Politics,” points to the impact of Hollywood stardom—something brand-new when the annexation vote was taken back in 1923—on the general public. Clare’s book told me a lot about the evolution of Southern California as a result of the burgeoning film industry. In particular, it clued me in to the power wielded by Mary Pickford, a woman determined to make her own way, both artistically and financially. Pickford fought hard to preserve the new little city as a garden spot populated by the wealthy and the famous. It was she who enlisted noteworthy actor and director friends to go door to door, appealing to Beverly Hills residents to vote against being annexed by Los Angeles. (The nearby city of Hollywood had knuckled under to its much-bigger neighbor back in 1910.)

 Pickford’s posse—which also included cowboy star Tom Mix, funny-man Harold Lloyd, and Fred Niblo, director of the original Ben-Hur—liked the privacy that living in Beverly Hills afforded. Clare explains that matinee idol Conrad Nagel, another of Pickford’s eight campaigners,  would one day even “head up a movement to build a wall around Beverly Hills to keep the outer world at bay.” This talk of a wall can’t fail to remind us of other public figures with showbiz roots who have used their fame as a political stepping stone. There’s Ronald Reagan, of course, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a certain reality-show host who has parlayed his celebrity all the way to the White House.