Song Lyric of the Day (Stevie Wonder, on a Woman ‘Lovely As A Summer Day’)

“My cherie amour, lovely as a summer day

My cherie amour, distant as the Milky Way.”—“My Cherie Amour,” written by Stevie Wonder, Henry Cosby, and Sylvia Moy, performed by Stevie Wonder on his My Cherie Amour LP (1969)

For the first day of summer, I could have drawn upon a whole range of cultural references from poetry, music, drama, film, painting—you name it. (And don’t think, before this blog is through—maybe even before this season is through!—that I won’t be using a whole bunch of them.) But, as school closed for the warmest months of the year in 1969, this hit by Stevie Wonder was climbing the charts. We didn’t have boom boxes then, disturbing all who came within the vicinity of it, nor iPads, with earplugs and self-selected tunes putting you in a self-absorbed aural cocoon. No, as often as not, in those 90-some days before I turned 10, the music would likely come from a transistor radio—an open invitation to all within earshot—and, if the melody was right, as warm as a caress.

When you’re young, as the imagination grows, the music sinks its roots into you. And so, even though Stevie Wonder did not yet possess the stunningly multi-faceted mastery he would display in the early-to-mid-Seventies, I would fall in love with this simple, artless, innocent, impassioned, achingly beautiful song, just as the Motown artist fell hard for the girl who inspired it.

On a page or computer screen, the lyrics above don’t sound like much—cliché-ridden, even. We don’t have a clue as to this girl’s eyes, hair, or any other aspect of her appearance, other than that she’s “little.” But “lovely as a summer day” is instinctively understood. (Even the likes of Henry James, about as far removed from Wonder as you can get, once wrote that “summer afternoon” were “the two most beautiful words in the English language.”) And, while you can’t exactly wring Dylanesque interpretations from “La la la la la la, La la la la la la,” all the wordless, inarticulate feelings of the heart are expressed here.  

Oh, and that title—who embodies love so much as the French?  Wonder made his object of desire an everywoman with that “Cherie.” It might have been a different story if he had stuck to his original title, “Oh My Marcia,” a reference to a young lady he met in  the Michigan School for the Blind in Lansing, Michigan. Luckily, co-writer Sylvia Moy (the Motown producer who had persuaded Berry Gordy not to drop the youngster from "Hitsville USA" when his voice began to change) strongly urged on him a more generic choice. Wonder agreed, and so we don’t, thankfully, have “Oh My Marcia” playing at every “Brady Bunch” reunion special.

Not that the Motown Master hated a little ribbing at his expense. In May 1983, Saturday Night Live ran a skit with Eddie Murphy listening to Stevie Wonder as “Alan, The Stevie Wonder Experience.” Murphy, distinctly unimpressed by this “dork,” suffers through a couple of painful Wonder impersonations before whipping out a pair of sunglasses and showing him how it’s done. (Murphy: “You’ve got to roll your neck around, like you’re choking.” Wonder as the Impersonator: “I will choke you if I don’t get this job!”) Finally, Wonder sounds just like himself as he ends with the beautifully plaintive “How I wish that you were mine.” Murphy: “It still sucks, man!” (See this video link for this classic skit.)

Over the years, “My Cherie Amour” has become one of the most performed songs from the Motown hit factory, covered by, to name a few, the Jackson 5, Tony Bennett, James Galway, Frankie Valli, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and George Benson. My own favorite interpretation is by opera singer Renee Fleming. But to me, it remains a summer song, due in no small part to Wonder himself—who, in a couple of years, with “I Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer,” proved all over again that he knew all about the sweet agony of the season.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘48 Hours,’ on the ‘Generosity of Women’)

Reggie (played by Eddie Murphy): “You got a lady, Cates?”

Jack (played by Nick Nolte): “Yeah.”

Reggie: “You know, the generosity of women never ceases to amaze me.”—48 Hours (1982), written by Roger Spottiswoode, Walter Hill, Larry Gross and Steve E.  de Souza, directed by Walter Hill

Few stars of recent decades have entered a worse, non-substance-abused-fueled downward career spiral than Eddie Murphy. Thirty years ago this past Saturday marked the premiere of 48 Hours, which launched the film career of the 21-year-old Saturday Night Live regular. From his entrance into that movie—where, for what feels like a few minutes, he’s seen but not heard, driving Nolte and an entire cellblock crazy with his rendition of The Police’s “Roxanne”—he drove at warp speed what otherwise was just another example of the buddies-against-their-will genre. The enormous success of that film would soon spark the even bigger moneymakers Trading Places and Beverly Hills Cop.

It’s been hit-or-miss for Murphy fans since then. The latter part of the Eighties and early Nineties were marked by pallid sequels and lame originals such as Coming to America. Fans such as myself kept g hoping that the next movie would prove better—only it didn’t. He improved somewhat with Bowfinger, The Nutty Professor, and the Shrek franchise, where he offered delicious turns as Donkey, but lately he’s been on a downturn again, with a string of box-office flops--A Thousand Words, Meet Dave and Tower Heist—that, according to this Huffington Post article by Cavan Sieczkowski, has led him to being named "Most Overpaid Actor in Hollywood" by Forbes.

Forget all that and watch the original 48 Hours again, when Murphy was still a sharp young kid, before the ego got so big it couldn’t make it safely into a room, when nearly everything he touched seemed fresh and funny and golden.

Movie Exchange of the Day (“The Blues Brothers,” on Lying to a Nun)

Jake (played by John Belushi), surprised as they arrive at their old orphanage: “What are we doing here?”

Elwood (played by Dan Aykroyd): “You promised you'd visit The Penguin the day you got out.”

Jake: “Yeah? So I lied to her.”

Elwood (incredulously): “You can't lie to a nun. We got to go in and visit The Penguin.”

Jake: “No... fucking... way.”—The Blues Brothers (1980), written by Dan Aykroyd and John Landis, directed by John Landis

Elwood is right: You can’t lie to a nun. But, as we find out in the following hilarious scene, Jake is right, too, to be wary of their spontaneous visit to the orphanage where they grew up: the decidedly pre-Vatican II Sister Mary Stigmata is about to leave her mark on them again.

I suspect I was far from alone in laughing like hell at Sister Mary beating the stuffing out of brothers Jack and Elwood. Yes, the rough-and-tough nun is a stereotype. But nearly every Catholic baby boomer at least knows of someone who’s experienced this particular form of discipline, and a number have known it firsthand as well.

I wish I got a kick out of the rest of the film—which premiered on this date in 1980—as much--even if the Catholic hierarchy has gotten over its uptight attitude toward the film upon its original release and now hails it as a "Catholic classic."

Like Caddyshack, another 1980 comedy that starred two leading members of Saturday Night Live’s Not Ready for Prime Time Players, The Blues Brothers has a frustratingly ramshackle structure. Yes, we know that comedy isn’t pretty, and there are some wonderful scenes here that make me wonder if my friend Jim isn’t right in regarding this as one of his favorite comedies.

But the whole thing is heavily reliant on raucous motion (the huge, squealing car chase) at the expense of wit. Moreover, funny bits just happen—they don’t build and develop. It feels exactly like what it was—a five-minute TV skit puffed up to two hours—and the strain shows.

In a way, director John Landis’ interaction with John Belushi here anticipates his later relationship with another breakout SNL star of a few years later, Eddie Murphy. The prior Landis-Belushi collaboration, Animal House, was a monster hit.

Two years later, however, momentum had swung away from the director and decidedly toward his star. The film was a hit—as of yet, nothing was going to stop Belushi.

But puffed up by ego, hopped up on drugs, the star was becoming considerably harder to work with. At one point, Landis couldn’t film a scene because Belushi was catatonic from a cocaine-and-Quaaludes combination. (In a couple of years, of course, he’d be dead all too soon.)

Similarly, in 1983, Landis helped Murphy avoid the sophomore jinx by making his second film, Trading Places, even more memorable than his debut, 48 Hours. By 1988, however, the Landis-Murphy partnership proved decidedly lame with Coming to America. The star’s gifts were still in evidence—in fact, they still are—but he was becoming less amenable to suggestions --and to the end of his remarkable ‘80s box-office run.

This Day in Film History (Eddie Murphy’s “Cop” Busts Laughing Into Beverly Hills)

December 5, 1984—Sylvester Stallone and Mickey Rourke’s loss turned out to be Eddie Murphy’s gain, as the former Saturday Night Live regular reaped box-office gold with a script that the two other stars rejected.

With $15.2 million in domestic revenues in its opening weekend, Beverly Hills Cop was well launched toward a worldwide gross of $316 million. At 23 years old, Murphy had reached his zenith as the profane, street-smart funnyman of the 1980s. He’s been trying to catch this lightning in a jar since then, mostly unsuccessfully.

The action-comedy took seven years from initial pitch to Christmas blockbuster. In 1977, producer Don Simpson—then at Paramount—and screenwriter Danilo Bach traded ideas for a scenario.

That first idea—a cop from East L.A. transferring to Beverly Hills—went nowhere. Simpson and boss Michael Eisner liked a different take that Bach had on the concept: the cop would now be from an East Coast city, turning Beverly Hills upside down to avenge the killing of a friend—kind of like Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, but with scenes on Rodeo Drive rather than in a corrupt city ruled by the mob.

When Bach moved on, Daniel Petrie Jr. then injected some much-needed humor into the script. For the next couple of years, the project would languish in development hell, scrutinized by one star before ultimately being discarded. First Mickey Rourke circled around it before moving on, then it was Sylvester Stallone’s turn.

Once Sly got hold of the script, he felt the ol’ Orson Welles mojo—you know, that whole actor-writer-director-producer thing—unsettling him, as it did a lot in the decade after he made Rocky, so he unpacked his typewriter and got to work. Not surprisingly, the humor so evident in Petrie’s version now seeped out. (If you want an idea of what Stallone’s script was like, consider his film Cobra, and the line that inspired--if that's the right word--its marketing campaign: “You’re the disease, and I’m the cure.”)

The best thing that happened to film comedy in the 1980s was that Stallone also lost interest in this project. Now the script made its way into Murphy’s hands.

Somewhere I read that screenwriters tailor their work for the talents of specific stars. (Thus, if you know that Bing Crosby will be playing your priest, you concoct scenes in which he’ll be called on to sing.) It’s nearly impossible, all these years later, to imagine anyone else but Murphy at this point in his career, in all his fun-loving insouciance, tackling Axel Foley.

Coming on the heels of 48 Hours and Trading Places, Murphy’s latest triumph had many fans, myself very much included, believing he could do no wrong. The next few years of increasingly unoriginal, lamely constructed star vehicles for him (The Golden Child, Coming to America, Harlem Nights) gradually stripped us of this illusion.

In the years since, Murphy has attempted to recapture his magic with pictures that were not bad (Boomerang, The Distinguished Gentleman, Bowfinger) and others that turned out to be staggering bombs (Vampire in Brooklyn, The Adventures of Pluto Nash). Sadly, his career has come to resemble, in one respect, that of the far-less-talented Stallone, in that he’s looked to one potential franchise after another before releasing progressively sorry sequels (think of the pitiful progeny of 48 Hours, The Nutty Professor, and Dr. Doolittle). The shame of it is that he can still be a wildly inventive comedian, as he demonstrated sporadically in parts of Comedy to America, the Nutty Professor films, and his hilarious voice-over as Donkey in the Shrek films.

Now, it appears, the same syndrome--beating a good thing into the ground--is happening with Beverly Hills Cop. A year ago, the star committed to the fourth installment of the adventures of Axel Foley. A month and a half ago, however, came the news that a new writer had been brought on board to re-tool the script.

This being Hollywood, nobody knows what to make of this. I’m sure Murphy hopes it’s a reprise of the creative destruction that preceded his triumph 25 years ago. But the possibility, by no means small, exists that all parties concerned have gone to the creative well once too often.

They never know how to leave well enough alone, do they?