48 Hrs.

48 Hrs.
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Walter Hill
Produced by	Lawrence Gordon Joel Silver
Written by	Roger Spottiswoode Walter Hill Larry Gross Steven E. de Souza
Starring	Nick Nolte Eddie Murphy Annette O'Toole
Music by	James Horner
Cinematography	Ric Waite
Edited by	Freeman A. Davies Mark Warner Billy Weber
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release dates	December 8, 1982 (1982-12-08)
Running time	96 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$12 million[1]
Box office	$78.9 million[2] 1.2 million admissions (France)[3]

48 Hrs. is a 1982 American action comedy film directed by Walter Hill, starring Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy (in his film debut and Golden Globe Award-nominated role) as a cop and convict, respectively, who team up to catch a cop-killer. The title refers to the amount of time they have to solve the crime. It is Joel Silver's first film as a film producer. The screenplay was written by Hill, Roger Spottiswoode, Larry Gross, Steven E. de Souza, and Jeb Stuart.

It is often credited as being the first film in the "buddy cop" genre, which included the subsequent films Beverly Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon, and Rush Hour.

A sequel, Another 48 Hrs., was released on June 8, 1990.

Plot

Convicted thief Albert Ganz is working as part of a road gang in California, when a big Native American man named Billy Bear drives up in a pickup truck and asks for water to cool off his truck’s overheating radiator. Ganz and Billy exchange insults and proceed to stage a fight with each other, wrestling in a river, and when the guards try to break up the fight, Billy slips a gun to Ganz, and Billy and Ganz kill two of the three guards and flee the scene. Two days later, Ganz and Billy kill Henry Wong (John Hauk), an associate of theirs. Later that same day, Inspector Jack Cates of the San Francisco Police Department's criminal investigation bureau joins two of his friends and co-workers Detective Algren and Detective Van Zant at the Walden Hotel to check out a man named G.P. Polson, who is in room 27. Jack waits downstairs while Algren and Van Zant head to room 27, where it turns out that G.P. Polson is Ganz. He kills Van Zant and Algren, and escapes with Billy, taking Jack's revolver.

The police station issues Jack a new pistol and fellow cop Ben Kehoe tells Jack about Ganz's former partner Reggie Hammond, who is in prison with 6 months to go on a three-year sentence for armed robbery. Jack manages to work alone in the search for Ganz and then visits Reggie at the prison. Jack gets Reggie a 48-hour leave from the prison so Reggie can help Jack find Ganz and Billy. Reggie leads Jack to an apartment where Ganz's last remaining associate Luther lives. When Jack looks around, Luther shoots at him and refuses to be interrogated, so Jack puts him in jail. That night, Reggie leads Jack to Torchy's, a redneck hangout where Billy used to be a bartender. Reggie, on a challenge from Jack, shakes the bar down, single-handedly bringing the crowd under his control. They get a lead on Billy's old girlfriend, but this also leads nowhere, as the girlfriend says she threw Billy out. Reggie confesses that he, Ganz, Billy Bear, Luther and Wong had robbed a drug dealer of $500,000 some years earlier and that the money was (and remains) stashed in the trunk of Reggie's car in a downtown parking garage. Instead of splitting the money, Ganz sold Reggie out, resulting in his incarceration. It was also the reason why Ganz and Billy took Luther's girlfriend Rosalie: they wanted Luther to get Reggie's money in exchange for her safe return.

However, Luther goes and gets the car, and Jack and Reggie tail him to a Muni station where Ganz comes to get the money. Luther, however, recognizes Jack, and Ganz and Billy escape, while Reggie chases after Luther. Left with nothing, Jack ends up going back to the police station and waits for Reggie to call. Jack goes to Vroman's, in the Fillmore district, to find Reggie, who has tracked Luther to a hotel across the street. Jack, humbled, apologizes for continuously berating and insulting Reggie. He lends Reggie some money to pay for a hotel room to have sex with a girl he's met, but as he leaves the club with her, he sees Luther leave the hotel. Luther gets onto a stolen bus driven by Billy and hands over the money to Ganz, who shoots Luther and presumably Rosalie. Ganz spots Jack and Reggie following them, and a car chase/gunfight ensues, which ends when Billy forces Jack's Cadillac through the window of a Cadillac showroom. At this point following a heated verbal thrashing from Jack's boss Haden, Jack and Reggie are ready to resign themselves to the fact that they failed to catch Ganz.

At a local bar, Jack wonders if Billy might go back to see his girl and use her place as a hideout. Jack and Reggie force their way inside and after a brief confrontation Reggie shoots Billy. Ganz escapes into a maze of alleyways, capturing Reggie, before being killed by Jack. Finally, Jack takes Reggie to go see the girl he had met earlier at Vromans. Jack leaves the money in Reggie's car, but asks for a loan on another Cadillac when he gets out a changed man. Jack disapproves and takes Reggie back to prison.

Cast

Production

Development

Lawrence Gordon came up with the original idea for the film.^[4] The premise had the Governor of Louisiana's daughter kidnapped by a criminal, who strapped dynamite to her head and threatened to blow her up in 48 hours if the ransom was not met. The meanest cop goes to the worst prison in the state and gets out the most vicious criminal for his knowledge of the kidnapper who was his cellmate.

Walter Hill says Gordon may have had the idea as far back as 1971 and a few writers worked on the project. In 1975 Gordon was making Hard Times with writer-director Walter Hill and editor Roger Spottiswoode. Spottiswoode wanted to direct and Hill suggested he break in by writing a script. He did a draft of 48 Hours supervised by Hill for Columbia Pictures, who had financed 48 Hours. Later Tracy Keenan Wynn worked on the script ^[5]

The film moved from Columbia to Paramount, who wanted to do a draft for Clint Eastwood. They hired Hill to rewrite the script with Eastwood as the criminal. He did so "but when I turned it in I said that I didn't think it would work," Hill said, adding "that the best idea would be to make Richard Pryor the criminal and have someone like Eastwood play the cop. Back in '78 or '79 no one seemed to think this was such a good idea."^[5]

Eastwood ended up playing a criminal in Escape from Alcatraz instead. As a result, 48 Hrs. went into limbo for two years. However Gordon and his co-producer Joel Silver did not forget the project. Gordon called Hill and asked him if he would make the film with Nick Nolte as Cates.^[4]

"Paramount felt that the combination of Nick Nolte and a good black actor would be commercial," said Hill. "What happened is very simple: Richard Pryor is now an enormous movie star, and that's changed everybody's mind about black lead players."

From the start, Hill envisioned a more improvisational film than he'd ever before created. "The story is traditional urban thriller: two terrible guys are out there and have to be brought down," he said. "But even though I enjoy working in genres, the point is always to explode them or give them a transfusion. So I made a very conscious decision to go with the elements of personality of the two players, rather than be overly genuflective to the narrative. Thrusting a white policeman and a black convict together carries so much gravity that we didn't have to beat the white-black thing to death. If it works, it's because of the actors' personalities."^[5]

Hill's first choice after Richard Pryor was Gregory Hines. When he was not available, Hill's then-girlfriend Hildy Gottlieb recommended her client, Eddie Murphy, then best known for his work on Saturday Night Live.^[6]

The character of Reggie Hammond was originally named Willie Biggs, but Eddie Murphy felt that was too stereotypical of a black man's name and changed it to Reggie Hammond.

Stephen De Souza worked on the script for a few weeks after Eddie Murphy was cast. Critic Michael Sragow says "The producers recommended de Souza to Hill because they thought he'd be good at adding a light touch to the action. Hill didn't find de Souza fast enough or his style of comic writing appropriate to the movie; he thought the writer contributed gags instead of personality touches (very few of which were used), and he just didn't develop the rapport with de Souza that he'd later have with Gross."^[5]

Hill brought on Larry Gross to work on the script three weeks prior to shooting.^[7] He told Gross "I've been working this fella and while I like em I know it's not gonna work out...." and called the film "a shaggy dog story. Defiant Ones plus chuckles."^[8]

Sragow says, "Hill has been known throughout his career for defining character through action rather than psychological badinage, but he knew that this movie would be more of a character piece than a plot picture, and he wanted a writer who'd challenge his own habits and assumptions. Throughout filming, Hill joked that he waved the flag called "myth and archetype"-trying to play off the folkloric expectations an audience might have for a big blonde hero like Nick Nolte-while Larry Gross waved a flag called "social and psychological realism." The writers' relationship became so symbiotic that Gross often found Hill coming down on the side of S&PR and and Gross defending the perogatives of M&A."^[5]

Shooting

Filming started 17 May 1982.^[9]

Murphy started a few weeks after principal photography began because he was finishing up a season of Saturday Night Live.^[4][10] The shoot went well but Hill ran into problems with studio executives. Michael Eisner, then head of Paramount, was worried that the film was not funny enough. Hill and his co-screenwriter, Larry Gross wrote more material tailored to Nolte's and Murphy's personalities. By Hill's account, they rewrote Murphy's character right to the very last day of shooting. Executives also found the footage of the gunfight in the hotel to be too violent and were worried that it would kill the film's humor. They told Hill that he would never work for Paramount again as a result.^[4]

In 2008, co-writer Larry Gross's contemporaneous diary of his days on set was published on the MovieCityNews website.^[7]

Reception

Box office

48 Hrs. was the seventh highest-grossing film of 1982.^[11] It grossed $4,369,868 in its opening weekend^[12] and $78,868,508 overall at the domestic box office.^[13]

Critical response

48 Hrs. received critical acclaim, and is considered by many as one of the best films of 1982.^{[14][15][16][17]} On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 92% "fresh" rating, based on 38 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Marking an auspicious feature film debut for Eddie Murphy, 48 Hrs. is a briskly paced action comedy that succeeds largely due to the outstanding chemistry between its two leads".^[18] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 71 out of 100, based on 8 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".^[19] In 2007, the staff at IGN named the movie the third greatest buddy cop film.^[20]

Accolades

48 Hrs. was nominated and won several critical awards.^[21] Walter Hill won the Grand Prix award at the Cognac Festival du Film Policier. Eddie Murphy was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Acting Debut - Male. The film's screenplay was nominated by the Edgar Allan Poe Awards for Best Motion Picture. James Horner also won an award for his score at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards.

The film was on the ballot for several of the American Film Institute's 100 series lists, including the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Laughs,^[22] a list of America's funniest films, AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills,^[23] a list of America's most heart-pounding films, and Eddie Murphy's line "I'm your worst fucking nightmare, man! A nigger with a badge" was a candidate for AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes.^[24]

Soundtrack

In January 2011, Intrada Records released the world premiere recording of James Horner's score and songs from the movie in a limited edition run of 5000 units.^[25] This was the first official release of the score; previous pressings from Europe were unofficial bootlegs with music from other James Horner film scores.^[26]

See also

• List of American films of 1982

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: 48 Hrs.

• 48 Hrs. at the Internet Movie Database
• 48 Hrs. at AllMovie
• 48 Hrs. at Box Office Mojo
• 48 Hrs. at Rotten Tomatoes
• Larry Gross' 48 Hrs. Diaries, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, and Part 10