Eddie Murphy turned 61 years old this year, which makes him roughly the same age John Wayne was when he played the out-to-pasture codger Rooster Cogburn in “True Grit.” That film, and Wayne’s subsequent Westerns, had an elegiac, one-last-ride feeling to them.
Yes, the Duke’s cancer was in remission at this point, but he still looked washed.
When he finally succumbed to the disease on the eve of the 1980s, the book quietly closed on an outmoded era of Hollywood filmmaking.
It was time.
Of all the golden age stars, Wayne was uniquely unsuited to the coked-up, strip-club glitz pioneered by producing teams like Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer and Jon Peters/Peter Guber.Of all the big-screen ’80s superstars, no one was more at home in this olio of excess than Eddie Murphy.
His fast-talking, nimble-minded riffing was perfectly attuned to the hurtling energy of the decade’s blockbuster action-comedies.
Murphy
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