48 Hrs.
Short description
Walter Hill's 48 Hrs. centres on a San Francisco police detective, Jack Cates, who is hunting a fugitive convict and the man's partner after the pair leave a trail of dead officers behind them. Unable to make progress on his own, Cates arranges for Reggie Hammond, a thief serving time for a half-million-dollar robbery and a former associate of the men he is chasing, to leave prison for 48 hours to help him. The two have little in common and less trust between them, and the clock is running on the arrangement.
Nick Nolte plays Cates and Eddie Murphy, in his first film role, plays Hammond; Annette O'Toole, Frank McRae, James Remar and David Patrick Kelly are among the credited cast. Hill directed from a screenplay he wrote with Roger Spottiswoode and Larry Gross, with Joel Silver and Lawrence Gordon producing. The film was released in December 1982 and runs 96 minutes.
Made for around 12 million dollars, it took roughly 79 million worldwide, a strong return that helped establish Murphy as a screen performer. Ratings are more measured: 6.9 out of 10 on IMDb from about 93,000 votes and 6.7 on TMDB from a much smaller sample. A critics' score of 7.5 from 52 reviews puts professional appraisal slightly above the audience scores. It stands sixth among the 22 features Hill directed, between Southern Comfort and Streets of Fire.
What's left behind the scenes
- The word 'fuck' appears 48 times in the film.
- The role of Jack Keates was offered to Mickey Rourke, but he declined. Furthermore, the role was also offered to Chris Christopher, as well as Jeff Bridges and Clint Eastwood. Bridges refused because he doesn't like cop movies, and Eastwood refused because he wanted to play a prisoner, not a police officer.
- As in many films by Walter Hill, the director's favorite car, a Sky Blue Convertible Cadillac, plays an important role (it is driven by Nick Nolte's character). The same car can be seen in "Brewster's Millions" and "Red Heat."
- To convincingly play a psychopath, actor James Remar didn't sleep for several days.
- According to Eddie Murphy, who played the con man, he was nearly fired once for being considered not funny enough. He didn't find out about this until the end of filming.
- During the filming of the scene where Sally, played by Denise Crosby, hits Eddie Murphy's character in the stomach with a prop baseball bat (the bat was rubber), he feared that the actress would actually hit him instead of stopping the bat a short distance from his body (as is usually done when filming such scenes). She demonstrated her skill with the bat and her ability to stop the swing in time first to director Walter Hill, and then to Nick Nolte (who played the police officer, partner to Murphy's character), to reassure Murphy, but during the filming of one of the takes she still grazed him with the bat.
- Michael Eisner, then head of Paramount Pictures, worried that the film wouldn't be funny enough. Director Walter Hill and screenwriter Larry Gross constantly wrote additional material for the characters of Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. According to Hill, they made additions and changes to the image of the con man played by Murphy right up to the last day of filming.
- The role of Reggie Hammond was originally intended for Gregory Hines, but he was busy filming Coppola's "The Cotton Club." Eddie Murphy, who played Reggie, was only the fourth candidate after Richard Pryor, Howard E. Rollins Jr., and Denzel Washington.
- Eddie Murphy said he didn't know how to "act" the moment his character pulls a gun, so he simply tried to copy Bruce Lee's face. He has consistently done so in similar situations ever since.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
