Eddie Murphy Raw

Eddie Murphy stands on stage in a red leather suit and talks without stopping for about an hour and forty minutes. The subjects: marriage, money, what Italian Americans became after Rocky, his father, the relationship problems fame brings, and the famous phone call in which Bill Cosby scolded him about swearing. The subject is not the jokes but the person on that stage. The self-belief of a twenty-six-year-old at the peak who knows he is at the peak is the show's main material, and it is the part that has aged most. The form is a concert recording. It opens with a staged family dinner in which a young Eddie tells jokes to his relatives; one of the child actors in it is Tatyana Ali. It was shot at the Felt Forum in New York and directed by Robert Townsend. On release it became the highest-grossing stand-up concert film and held that record for many years. Who it is for: anyone who wants to see the stand-up tradition of the eighties and Murphy's stage energy. Who it is not for: viewers with no patience for the passages about women and gay men; that material was contested even at the time and reads as plainly crude now.