From the Rental Vault: Harlem Nights (1989)

Eddie Murphy was at the peak of his influence in the late 1980s and leveraged it to be able to produce and direct a movie featuring some of his own heroes amid a largely African-American cast. Coming out several months after Spike Lee's debut Do the Right Thing, some movie writers suggested Harlem Nights could also be important to African-Americans in the movie industry, since Murphy's greater star power would mean bigger box office. It did indeed make more money; $95 million to Right Thing's $37 million, but it did not post numbers like previous Murphy vehicles and did not do well with critics.

In the later years of the Great Depression, Club Sugar Ray is a Harlem hotspot, a dance club also offering gambling and fronting a brothel owned by Madam Vera (Della Reese). Ray (Richard Pryor) runs the club with the help of a younger man whom he raised as his own son, Vernon "Quick" Brown (Murphy). Although de facto segregation still divides New York City, Club Sugar Ray has white clientele as well and it success draws the attention of mobster Bugsy Calhoune (Michael Lerner). Calhoune starts leaning on Ray for a percentage of the club and brothel take, using corrupt cop Phil Cantone (Danny Aiello) as his weapon.

Ray realizes that he can't win in a fight with a mobster at Calhoune's level so he decides to shutter the club and run a con game on Calhoune. The complicated plot relies on the mobster's greed as well as Cantone's and on the cleverness of Ray and Quick.

Seen from a 30-year distance, some of the reasons for Harlem Nights' underperformance at the box office are even clearer today without Murphy's megawatt stardom overshadowing them: It doesn't have very many laughs for a comedy, it's glacially paced for a caper movie and it's got far too many moving parts for a star vehicle. Murphy was a first-time director and had also written the script, which left far too few voices to crop up and say, "Are you sure this works?" Murphy himself, recalling the movie many years later, remembered how all of the comedians on the set (Redd Foxx, Arsenio Hall, Thomas Mikal Ford and Robin Harris also had roles) kept everyone laughing non-stop between takes -- but he never seems to be able to channel any of that humor or energy onto the screen.

All of the performances are competent; most of the cast had quite a few roles in their filmographies even if only in bit roles. If Murphy's vision had been augmented with some advice on the script and direction, and if he had been able to make up his mind which direction he wanted to take -- comedy, caper flick or high-concept star vehicle -- Harlem Nights could have helped break through some of the stereotyping walls built around African-American directors and their work. Lee and other directors like John Singleton were proving that an African-American-directed movie centered on African-American experiences with an African-American cast didn't have to be a comedy or belong to the "blaxploitation" genre of the 1970s. A critical success for Harlem Nights might have demonstrated such movies could also perform at the box office and broken a lot of barriers (All but the most virulent racists figure out how to deal their differences when it comes to the color green). But the curiously lifeless result of its combined talents kept that from happening, and leaves the movie itself memorable for what it failed to do instead of what it did.