Martin Brest | Beverly Hills Cop / 1984

learning how to lie

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Petrie, Jr. (screenplay, based on a story by Danilo Bach and Daniel Petrie, Jr.), Martin Brest (director) Beverly Hills Cop / 1984

 

Martin Brest’s 1984 comedy is basically a vehicle for actor Eddie Murphy’s infectious laugh interrupted by his naughty policeman antics and skits in which he mimes various types. It’s a likeable enough film, particularly given the good-old-boy restraints of the Laurel and Hardy-like team of Beverly Hills cops, Detective Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and Sergeant John Taggart (John Anton). Yet the more I see this work, the more I realize its true emptiness with its often misogynistic and homophobic tropes, and its vaudeville-based comedy antics.

     In fact, there is hardly any meat to it. Viewers early perceive, almost from the beginning, what is about to happen. Axel Foley—bad boy, foul-mouthed cop is a man born to get into trouble. And in this case, after witnessing the death in his hometown of Detroit of one of his best friends, Mickey, he is ordered almost immediately to stay off the case, disciplined for a recent unauthorized sting of a theft of a truck filled with cigarettes. Realizing that the case leads back to Los Angeles, Foley demands a vacation to secretly search out the villains, having heard his friend mention he had worked for a gallerist in Beverly Hills.

    The shift allows the film full range to satirize the wealthy and the pansy art world that has been at the heart of film comedy since its beginnings, even hinting, in this case, at elements of just such an evil trio—the art collector Victor Maitland (Steven Berkoff) and his evil male companion Zack (Jonathan Banks), along with a female friendly-spy who works for Maitland, Jenny Summers (Lisa Eilbacher)—we have previously encountered in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest.

    Once out-of-towner Foley stumbles into the chic enclose of Beverly Hills, he begins to rack up havoc almost everywhere he goes from a hip city art gallery to the hallowed halls of a private club (actually filled in Pasadena), with the Beverly Hills coppers bumbling along after. Before you can even say Rodeo Drive, Foley has topped them in their tracks using—as have so many vaudevillian acts—several servings up of food involving cakes in the face and bananas that slip up the chase.

    Jenny provides the misogynistic fodder while almost everyone else, including the sexually innocent Billy Rosewood and Maitland’s gallery assistant Serge (Bronson Pinchot) kick off the fag jokes.

    Pinchot’s imitation of an effete gallery assistant whose accent (filled with various layers of French, Israeli, and Russian mispronunciations of English mixed together to make him almost incomprehensible) almost gets away with it, beginning with his introductory question “and what is pertaining?,” scolding his handsome open-shirted underling (“cover dis up, you look like a dog to scrub”; “it’s not sexy, it’s animal”) and renaming Axel as Ahmed as he offers him something to drink, “a wine, a cock-tail, [emphasis on the tail], espresso,” “I make it back there myself with a little lemon twist, [almost winking] try it.” In fact, his mishmash of affected art jabber is one of the funniest moments of the film, since he at least Pinchot’s Serge represents a truly original stab at a gay stereotype.

     Everything else from there, however, is downhill beginning with an absolutely fruity black waiter at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, played by Damon Wayans, flailing with limp wrists and a lisp that I had presumed had gone out of style in the 1930s. 

     The writers follow this foul joke up by Murphy’s own pretense of being a highly effeminate lover of Maitland who slips into a private club for absolutely no purpose other than to confront his evil nemesis by telling the host that his 

doctor has just informed him that he is infected with “herpesimplex” 10 and therefore needs to warn the art dealer before things begin to fall off his body. The reverberations of the active AIDS crisis in this scene from 1984, when the media was finally becoming aware of the so-called “gay disease,” makes this one of the most homophobic jokes ever screened, so disgusting that almost any level-headed, sensitive LGBTQ viewer should have fled from the theater, although like me, probably didn’t, having become so resigned to cinema mockery of sexual difference. In fact, Foley even rewards his gallant Beverly Hills foes a free evening at an out-of-jurisdiction heterosexual strip club.

     Any fun the film might offer have offered is now reduced to Murphy pretending to be a customs’ inspector where, after forcing open a piece of freight addressed to Maitland, he discovers coffee grinds associated with the smuggling of cocaine.

     With Taggart and Rosewood on his trail, Foley finally breaks into Maitland’s armed compound where he encounters the whole force of Maitland’s protective gunmen, the three (Foley, Rosewood, and Taggart) shooting up havoc before the Beverly Hills police Lieutenant Andrew Bogomil (Ronny Cox)—a man who goes “strictly by the book”—arrives with a squadron of black-and-whites only to find that Foley and his fumbling friends have killed the gunman and Maitland, vindicating Foley’s suspicions. Nothing like a cops and robbers shoot out to end such a disgusting American concoction.

     Several times throughout the movie, the honest Taggart and Rosewood have admitted the truth when questions, with the fast-talking fibbing Foley scolding them for having “fucked up a perfectly good lie.” This time around, Bogomil himself fabricates a story to his superior, Chief Hubbard (Stephen Elliott) about the chaos spread out before them. The Beverly Hills police have finally learned how to lie. Surely it’s only a step from there to a constant creator of false realities such as President Trump to call in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to get rid of any other undesirables who might have stumbled their way into that wealthy small city in the middle of Los Angeles.

     In the end, Axel Foley himself, is literally shepherded out of town. Yet we knew that even this clearly racist riddance of rubbish in 1984 would only mean a later meet-up, given how easily Foley has found access to the wealthy white world of criminals. There were two later sequels which only revealed the true tawdriness of the original, which it is almost impossible to believe was the highest grossing movie of the year in which it was released, and shamefully was selected in 2024 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Sorry to say, it probably does truly represent the US experience.

 

Los Angeles, December 17, 2012; revised January 14, 2026.

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2012)