“You fucked up a perfectly good lie,” Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley says to two Beverly Hills police officers in the smash 1984 hit Beverly Hills Cop. Foley, a Detroit police officer conducting his own freelance investigation in California, just convinced the two straitlaced local officers to join him in a strip club, where Foley foiled an attempted robbery. Covering everyone, he tells the BHPD lieutenant that in fact it was “supercops” Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and John Taggart (John Ashton) who made the bust. When the abashed officers admit that Foley did it all, Foley is befuddled. “I’m trying to figure you guys out, but I haven’t yet,” he says. “But it’s cool.”
It’s hard to overstate how famous the first Beverly Hills Cop made Eddie Murphy. The movie topped the box office for 13 straight weeks, from December 1984 to March 1985, and became the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history. Murphy made a triumphant return to host Saturday Night Live; he made Paramount piles of money; he made an album so dead-serious that his cover photo—Eddie leaning against a white piano—was taken by Annie Leibovitz. (He was so popular that not even releasing the execrable song “Party All the Time” could make him less popular.)
The movie that made all this happen was one of the great Hollywood star vehicles of all time, a movie custom-designed to showcase Eddie Murphy’s strengths: his motormouthed wisecracking, his blue-collar smarts, his high spirits, his cool. It did all this while making him that icon of 1980s movie toughness: the maverick cop. Axel Foley’s Blackness is expertly played off the white-bread cops he encounters in Beverly Hills. Foley knows how they do things in Detroit, so when he lands in the fantasyland of Beverly Hills, he makes it his mission to teach the by-the-book department what it takes to crack a real crime in a real city.
You might not remember this the way you remember Serge’s mincing malapropisms or Murphy’s infectious laugh, but the narrative arc of the first Beverly Hills Cop is, literally, Foley demonstrating to the Beverly Hills officers the power of breaking the rules: talking his way into warehouses without a warrant, disobeying direct orders, charging into a house with gun drawn, and covering up all the misconduct he happened to commit while battling a drug-smuggling art gallery owner. After the movie’s climactic shootout, Foley congratulates that same BHPD lieutenant—not for saving lives, but for lying his ass off to the chief.