Robert Townsend

  • Eddie Murphy: Raw (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2022) Perhaps the most striking moments of stand-up comedy concert film Eddie Murphy: Raw aren’t the comic bits themselves, but the atmosphere surrounding them. Unlike the vast majority of stand-up performances captured on video, Eddie Murphy was a superstar when he toured and shot the film. At the time, he was America’s best-known comedian by virtue of his SNL stint, well-received albums and a dynamite movie career. As a result, Raw blurs the lines between a concert movie and a recording of a comic performance. The vast, vast audience surrounding Murphy and laughing at once is a strikingly different one than the small-venue crowds at most stand-up recordings. You can feel Murphy revelling in his status as a megastar. While I’m not that fond of the cold-open scripted sketch that begins the film, the moments that follow establish, through shots of crowds and fawning fan comments (“I can’t wait to see him in those leather pants!”), just how big Murphy was at the time, and his rock-star status before he even starts his set. Fortunately, much of what follows rises up to his expected standard. I’m not that fond of the meandering last third of the film, but his material on relationships remains cutting and funny, while the moments in which he addresses his fame offer a glimpse at a very different lifestyle. The only thing funnier than the film itself is the experience of watching it as broadcast on BET—since the channel bleeps out profanity and Raw was, at the time of its release, the film containing the most profanity, much of the film’s broadcast time is one bleep after another, with some entire sentences being bleeped out at times. (Don’t worry—the nature of profanity being what it is, there’s no loss of meaning here.)  Eddie Murphy: Raw often gets mentioned in film histories for valid reasons—it remains the highest-grossing stand-up comedy concert film even made (a record unlikely to ever be broken), and an early film by Robert Townsend (director) and a few Wayans brothers (writers and producers). But even for audiences unaware of the historical context, it remains a striking portrait of a comedian at the very top of his profession, and playing to that status.

  • B*A*P*S (1997)

    B*A*P*S (1997)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2021) Sometimes, silliness is all you need. In B*A*P*S (Black American Princesses), we have two feisty young black women somehow finding their way to a rich white man’s Beverly Hills house, upsetting the neighbour’s habits and prejudices. It’s all executed according to silly farce, what with stereotypes crashing into one another, but director Robert Townsend does get to mount a stealth attack on white orthodoxy, sending the down-to-earth exuberance of its protagonists crashing against the staid manners of their new surroundings. You can easily tell who’s good and who’s not from the way they embrace black culture — all the way to the well-mannered butler with a secret fondness for black TV shows. Martin Landau plays the charmed ailing white millionaire, but the stars of the show are clearly Halle Berry and Natalie Desselle as the titular BAPs as they set out to improve Beverly Hills culture with their own flair. Berry looks surprisingly good as a blonde, although I also liked Troy Byer (who also wrote the screenplay) as a no-nonsense lawyer. The silliness of the film’s execution is less interesting than its overall status as a racially subversive dismantlement of the white establishment. (I’m sure someone, somewhere, already wrote at length about how so-called “dumb” black comedies à la B*A*P*S and How High are far more interesting as tools of systemic racial derision.)  No, the film is not always that clever or witty in its moment-to-moment execution — I’m sure that there’s a better movie to be made from the same material (from Byer’s public disappointment with the results, the original screenplay is probably worth a look), but let’s highlight for a moment the worth of a black-written black-directed black-starring comedy openly espousing black values as explicitly opposed to the white Southern California establishment. While contemporary reviews were harsh (even Roger Ebert, normally a sympathetic audience for this kind of film, hated it), I suspect that more recent assessments are kinder to it — indeed, B*A*P*S seems to have become a bit of a fondly-remembered cult classic in the meantime, which sounds about right for the kind of silly film it appears to be.

  • Hollywood Shuffle (1987)

    Hollywood Shuffle (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2019) There are a few movies out there that are best reviewed after reading about their production. A first uninformed look at Hollywood Shuffle is invariably going to come across as being too harsh on the material. This can be explained by the film’s extremely low-budget, writer-director Robert Townsend’s overriding satirical intentions, and sheer underdog nature of the project (which was financed through credit cards and acting gigs, and took two years to complete in guerilla-style filmmaking conditions). It’s clearly didactic in how it really wants you to understand the problems that faced black actors in 1980s Hollywood, and unapologetic in the ways it gets in your face about it. The result is unequal. With Keenen Ivory Wayans writing part of the script, the humour is very uneven, ranging from classic sequences (such as the one where he imagines a hostile press berating him for not being black enough, or the fantasy movie-review sketch) to more humdrum material. It’s also (especially in hindsight) imperfect in how it tackles inequality—loudly advocating for fewer black stereotypes while indulging in other kinds of stereotyping. I do have a sneaking suspicion that the film is funnier if you know all about life in 1980s Hollywood for black actors: that it’s an inside joke that happened to have wider appeal. Still, in the evolution of black cinema through the decades, there’s clearly a place for Hollywood Shuffle as an eloquent capture of a specific time and place—not that things are necessarily perfect now, but that by the 1980s you could see black cinema go from the superstars à la Eddie Murphy (explicitly referred to here) to a more accessible brand of black cinema. Do remember that Spike Lee had just come out with She’s Gotta Have It in 1986…