Eddie Murphy's 'Harlem Nights' has value 30 years later

Harlem Nights was a regular cable and syndication staple in my household, and I suspect a lot of other African-Americans have a similar appreciation for it as do. It's a profane, mean, crude little gangster movie, with great production values and surprisingly low keys laughs.

It has a horrendous reputation, and if it's remembered at all in mainstream circles it's almost always viewed as an embarrassing vanity project (Eddie Murphy both directed, co-wrote and stars in the film) although it was a solid hit at the box office. It did mark the beginning of what seemed like a backlash to its star that he's never 100% recovered from.

Watching it 30 years later, it's a fascinating look into Murphy's psyche at the time. Even if it is ostensibly a throwback caper movie (at times it plays like a black rip-off of The Sting, with Pryor in the Paul Newman role and Murphy replacing Redford), there is a lot more bubbling up beneath the surface here.

Now, I will agree with the quibbles. It is a horrendously misogynist movie not to mention an occasionally slow, strangely quiet film considering the fact that it's meant to be a broad comedy.

Still, there is something irresistible about finally seeing Murphy and Pryor share the screen (with Redd Foxx) too. The relationship is more father-son than a comedic pairing. And it's possible Murphy was trying to earnestly shift at the time to slightly more dramatic flair.

Following the largely forgotten (but also quite profitable) Another 48 Hours, Murphy would make his bid for mainstream romantic comedy credibility with Boomerang just a couple years after this. In some ways this is his trial run.

The difference is in that movie he is at least allowed to eventually be vulnerable where here he is abrasively egotistical throughout. Murphy seems to be perpetually pissed and it seems as though he was in real life too.

That year he famously gave a fairly bitter speech at the Academy Awards calling out their lack of diversity decades before it was cool. Here he was the biggest movie star in the world in front of an academy that didn't recognize his work (and wouldn't for another 20 years) and who probably took him and his talent for granted.

The bitterness -- especially racially motivated frustration -- is all over Harlem Nights. In the film Murphy and his surrogate father (played by Pryor, is a quiet, restrained role) run a profitable speakeasy that is encroaching on the business of a big mafia chief (played by Michael Lerner). The mobsters, who are nearly all portrayed as virulently racist (which in fairness, may not have been inaccurate for the period), seek to push them out of town because, well, why share in the success with black people?

Pryor, Murphy and their cadre of hoods accept that they will have to relocate to another city or they'll forever be under the thumb of the white mob and their political allies plus police muscle. But instead of simply turning tail and running, they conspire to take revenge on Lerner and his crew before they skip town.

As these plot wheels turn, sometimes awkwardly, there are a lot of scenes which really revel on white jealously of black success. Danny Aiello, who would be Oscar nominated that year for his stellar turn as a suppressed racist in Do the Right Thing, is similarly compelling here as a more unabashed bigot, who can barely disguise his disdain for wealthy black people. The thing is there's nothing comedic about him, he almost seems like a villain from a very different, more serious movie -- but that doesn't make his imposing presence here any less interesting.

On the funny tip, there is a hilarious (at least to me) bit with Arsenio Hall playing a distraught gangster who is having a sustained meltdown over the murder of his brother (he mistakenly think's Murphy is responsible). He is crazed, screaming, crying -- all comedically -- it's a delightfully silly little bit which also seems to come from another movie. He accidentally shoots someone in his crew and balls out another for firing a tiny pistol while the rest use machine guns.

There's quite a bit here that I see as cultural humor -- Della Reese getting shot in the toe just plays differently with a black audience, don't ask me why.

Eddie Murphy has always been a mercurial one. He never directed again and as I point our frequently he pretty much has prematurely retired from Hollywood. There is his long-awaited biopic of Rudy Ray Moore, which if the production team is any indication -- it may be awards fare, but he has basically evaporated. This movie. as flawed as it may be, is a glimpse of what it was like when he was still firmly on top and like I said, it's fascinating.