When I Was Young

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NEARLY 30 years ago, 48 Hrs. arrived in theatres with a bang. That 1982 movie, in which a gruff white detective partners with a smooth-talking black convict to hunt down a killer, took in US$78 million ($110 million) at the North American box office on a US$13 million budget, transformed a young comedian turned actor named Eddie Murphy into a Hollywood megastar and gave wings to a cinematic tradition as emblematic of the '80s multiplex as John Hughes' teenage dramedies: The interracial buddy-cop movie.

Among the hordes of teenage boys who flocked to 48 Hrs. was the comedian-turned-actor Tracy Morgan.

"I loved it. You've got these two guys alone in this cop car, sharing their lives despite their differences," Morgan, the 30 Rock star and former Saturday Night Live cast member, said this month.

"I grew up watching 48 Hrs., Lethal Weapon and all of those movies, and I always wanted to be in one of them."

With his new film, he has gotten his wish. Cop Out, which opens in the United States on Friday, stars Morgan as a Brooklyn detective, with Bruce Willis as his partner. The movie is a throwback to the heyday of Murphy-Nolte, Glover-Gibson and the rainbow coalition of wise-cracking, scum-busting partners that followed close behind, including Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal in Running Scared.

CLEARLY BLACK AND WHITE

The interracial buddy-cop movie (in which, it bears noting, the buddies aren't always police officers per se, but are always crime fighters) was an '80s bumper crop, but it has outlived the decade.

48 Hrs. gave way to a stream of riffs and re-imaginings that included Another 48 Hrs., The Last Boy Scout, Die Hard: With A Vengeance, Men In Black, Rush Hour and Training Day. Cop Out, however, was intended as an homage to the genre as it existed in its classic incarnation.

"I wanted to go for the same vibe Running Scared or Beverly Hills Cop had, where there's a real sense of danger, but you still get to make the funny," said Kevin Smith, the film's director.

"I tell people this movie is like Lethal Weapon, only with 60 per cent less action." To nail the retro ambience Smith hired Harold Faltermeyer, the composer of the Beverly Hills Cop theme song, to write a synthesiser-heavy score.

If the interracial buddy-cop movie has proven itself long lasting, it owes much of this resilience to its relationship to hot-button social concerns. The genre has allowed film-makers to confront race relations but in a rock-'em, sock-'em context: Low on speechifying, high on car chases.

This was true of perhaps the first interracial buddy-cop movie to speak of - Norman Jewison's In The Heat Of The Night. That 1967 murder mystery, which brought together Sidney Poitier as an ace Philadelphia homicide detective and Rod Steiger as a backwoods Mississippi sheriff, is an attack on Southern bigotry and an ode to racial cooperation.

In an interview several years ago Jewison said his hope for the film was that white audiences would experience "the relationship between white and black in the South", stressing that, for this to work, the subject "had to be confronted in a very entertaining and theatrical way".

In The Heat Of The Night is a high-minded sort of thriller, but it shares its basic plotline with many of the flashier action vehicles that succeeded it: After initial hostility, a black man and a white man gradually work past their differences to focus on the greater good. Sometimes the racial tension between them is explicit, as in 48 Hrs., in which Nick Nolte's Jack subjects Murphy's Reggie to a barrage of nasty slurs.

Sometimes that tension is more diffused, or shades into broader anxieties about age or class, as in Lethal Weapon and the Beverly Hills Cop films.

BROMANCE IS COLOUR-BLIND

Racism figures overtly into 1989's Lethal Weapon 2 as an obstacle that unites, rather than divides, Mel Gibson's Riggs and Danny Glover's Murtaugh. The villains in the film are pasty-faced avatars of intolerance: Diplomats from apartheid-era South Africa.

Of course, relations between the police and the black residents were hardly utopian in late-'80s Los Angeles - a city just a few years shy of Rodney King and the 1992 riots.

"The movie's a sort of wish fulfilment," said screenwriter Shane Black, who created the Lethal Weapon franchise and wrote The Last Boy Scout. "In a troubled ethnic climate, a movie where black and white work together with nothing but mutual respect? I think it pointed to a better future." (A fifth Lethal Weapon sequel has been rumoured, but, Black said "with near-complete certainty, it's not happening".)

Melvin Donalson, a professor of film at California State University, Los Angeles, and the author of Masculinity In The Interracial Buddy Film, is more ambivalent about the genre's politics. Interracial buddy-cop movies were a leap forward from earlier black-and-white pairings - Will Rogers and Stepin Fetchit, say, or Jack Benny and Eddie (Rochester) Anderson - in which, Donalson said: "The black character serves mostly to enhance the white one."

But, he added, movies like 48 Hrs. tend to treat racial tension as something that can be simply worked through and gotten over, an interpersonal problem rather than an entrenched institutional one. "As cops, the black and white characters fight for and validate a system that, for all intents and purposes, works."

Donalson also sees the genre as tied to a broader backlash against feminist upheavals of the era: A brawny bloc of movies where men could be men and women hardly figured.

To him, interracial buddy-cop films put a multi-cultural face on traditional notions about gender, "affirming that whether you're a black man, white man, Asian man or Latino man, you're still the person who should be in charge." (The films also represented the rising commercial viability of black actors in the '80s.)

In Cop Out, there is no racial tension between Tracy Morgan's Paul and Bruce Willis' Jimmy.

When the movie begins, they have been partners for nine years, and they behave more like a married couple than wary bedfellows.

"They can't see that one's bald and one's black," said Robb Cullen, who wrote the film with his brother Mark. "We never came at it as, this is a black-and-white movie."

Mark Cullen said Cop Out was the interracial buddy-cop movie given a post-racial makeover - a film in which bromance is colour-blind. "The way we looked at it, we were just writing a romantic comedy for two guys." THE NEW YORK TIMES

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