The Problematics: ‘48 Hrs’ Is An Action Classic That Turns Out To Be Smarter About Race Relations Than We Gave It Credit For

Recently I experienced a pretty bad movie which featured a Black drug dealer as one of its central characters. And this character used the racial epithet beginning with an “N” so frequently and with such vehemence that I got the queasy feeling that the white guys making the film were enjoying putting it in his mouth. It started to come off as a stealth way of expressing maybe resentment that they’re enjoined from using it themselves.

Such are the peculiar phenomena of today’s fraught culture. You’d think maybe 38 years ago in movies it might have been worse. Take, for instance, 48 Hrs. Eddie Murphy’s first film role was a not-unexpected (to anyone with a lick of common sense, which excludes most actual movie executives of the time) breakout success for the Saturday Night Live sensation. A rough action (not “buddy cop”) movie with, naturally, a lot of comedic accents, its motor was an initially antagonistic relationship between a gruff white police guy and a Black convict.

In the rough and tumble of the give and take, the so-called N-word is indeed dropped. Care to guess how many times? If you guessed more than six, you’d be wrong; I kept count. And, in one of the instances, it’s said as a character is quoting himself in the middle of an apology.

Written, over various stages, by future director Roger Spottiswode, future Die Hard scribe Stephen E. DeSouza, and Larry Gross with the film’s director, Walter Hill, 48 Hrs. is indeed raucous and raw in its characters’ attitudes and the language they use to put them across. But it’s never show-offish in this respect, and it’s always clear about its motivations.

The first use of racist language happens early on. A prison chain gang labors away, under the watch of some heavily armed guards. A Native American drives to the site; his pickup truck’s overheating, can he get some water? One of the convicts, soon to be known as Ganz (James Remar) taunts him as “Tonto” and makes reference to “firewater.” He’s trying to start a fight; as we soon find out, Ganz and Billy Bear are accomplices, staging a racialist ruckus to distract the guards before blowing them away and making a daring escape.

These guys don’t care who they kill, and soon enough, holed up in a cheap hotel with some prostitutes, they slay two cops (one of whom is played by Jonathan Banks, the “what an asshole!” guy from Airplane!) and steal the gun of Our White Hero, Jack Cates, played by Nick Nolte at the height of his gritty-voiced, rumpled, but still sexy period. With his tail between his legs, he’ll do anything to catch the cop killers, including forging some paperwork to temporarily spring a close-to-release convict, a supposed small-timer named Reggie Hammond, whose connection to the case seems tenuous, for a 48 hour furlough to track the bad guys down.

Few screen introductions are more memorable than that of Murphy’s out-of-tune screeching of “Roxanne” in a jail cell. Hammond’s wisecracks and slick self-regard make him immediate water to Cates’ oil, and the “we ain’t brothers, we ain’t partners, we ain’t friends” dance begins. In the end, they end up being all three, kind of.

Despite the fact that practically every line of dialogue is an almost perfectly crafted, and genuinely smart, zinger (and here I ought to probably disclose that in recent years I’ve become friendly with one of the screenwriters, Larry Gross, whose diaries of the making of this movie are revealing and generous and dishy and thoughtful as hell), 48 Hrs. is a classic action movie because of great visual storytelling.

Clocking in at a lean 96 minutes, it contains not a single unnecessary shot. The action and chase scenes are spaced out across the narrative intelligently, and they always get the job done. Yes, the shifts from real San Francisco streets to sound stages is a little obvious near the end, but that’s showbiz.

But back to that dialogue. Because Cates is bent on riding Hammond for the goods (he’s closer to Ganz and Billy Bear than the cop had even suspected, for reasons related to a briefcase containing $500,000), he of course gets racial on the guy, dropping the phrase “smart boy” with an emphasis on the “boy,” and calling Reggie “watermelon.” This is about a full third into the movie, by the way, to give you an idea of its overall restraint.

One of the movie’s most memorable set pieces occurs when Reggie convinces Cates to let him use the cop’s badge when they enter what turns out to be a very redneck bar. This is where the movie shows its true allegiances, while delivering a deft analysis of power dynamics when they’re propped up by police credentials. It’s in this scene where Murphy delivers the immortal line “I’m your worst nightmare: a n—–r with a badge,” and indeed these Confederate flag wavers are in a state of dire discomfort.

Less quoted but equally revealing is Cates’ apology to Reggie near the end of the movie, after, they’ve realized brotherhood, partnership, and yes, even friendship. “N—–r, watermelon, I didn’t mean that stuff. I was just doing my job, keeping you down.” The admission that his job is to keep Reggie down generally is startling. And Reggie’s rejoinder, which is easy to miss, is also first class: “Doin’ your job don’t explain everything, Jack.” To which Jack nods.

Reggie then says “As long as you’re feeling like Abraham Lincoln…” and returns to the ask he’s been making since Cates took the cuffs off: to look the other way for a spell while he seeks out some sex relations. In the world of 48 Hrs., as Gross lays out in his production diary, men are constantly seeking women and never getting through to them, and while circumstances can be blamed to some extent, most of the time, particularly in Jack’s case, it’s on the guy, his inability to communicate, and his emotional reticence. (And Jack’s girlfriend is played by Annette O’Toole. Who would want to be emotionally unavailable to such a women?)

As for Reggie, his sex talk is pretty sexist, grotesquely so — it’s ostensibly a comic exaggeration, and in reality the sort of stuff that helped, for better or worse, make Murphy’s reputation as a “delirious” say-anything standup.

But even in this respect, the movie has an interesting tell: Once Reggie succeeds in his crass aims, the picture shows him speaking to his conquest, Candy (Olivia Brown), in a way that’s respectful and sweet; you believe his promise that he’ll take her someplace nice for dinner once he gets sprung from prison for real. Of course, once he’s back on the streets with Cates he brags about having a certain part of his anatomy bronzed. The good guys of this movie are capable of doing the right thing, but among other boys, they will be boys.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream 48 Hrs.