Devil in a Blue Dress: Worth Seeing but a Better Read

 

 

 

Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

Directed by Carl Franklin

Sony Pictures Releasing, 102 minutes, R (violence, language, brief nudity)

★★★

 

It's hard to believe that Devil in a Blue Dress was released 30 years ago. This Denzel Washington vehicle is a stylish film, that often looks a lot better than it is. Call it a film noir in color, neo noir, or a crime drama. It's based on a Walter Mosley novel. He's one of my favorite writers, but his books are often complex in the sense that there are a lot of characters. This sometimes means that there's too much going on to capture in a movie of under two hours. Director Carl Franklin might have done well to delete a few of them to present a truncated tale involving Mosley's favorite detective Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins (Denzel).

 

The story is set in Los Angeles 1948. It has the right look, but let's not confuse it with The Big Sleep or Chinatown. Rawlins has just been laid off from the aircraft plant and he needs money for his house, car, and stylish wardrobe. He lives along Central Avenue in the Watts section of Los Angeles, a neighborhood filled with well-kempt homes, low-life bars, juke joints, and flashy but often legally ambiguous clubs. He's approached to find a white woman named Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals). Easy has no interest and looking for a white woman, but he keeps getting strong-armed by the LAPD, a white PI,  and creditors who collectively seem like the Keystone Kops. At times it's difficult to know whether to call this film a crime drama or a comedy, though humor is common in Moseley's novels. In one awkward scene Easy is having an intimate moment with Coretta James (Lisa Nicole Carson), when the LAPD invite themselves into his living room to “encourage” him to look for Daphne. DeWitt Albright (Tom Sizemore) also badgers Easy. He’s the white PI who has hired Easy because, for some reason, he can't find Daphne on his own–possibly because he’s afraid of the neighborhood, though Easy suspects ulterior motives. He is also hustled by an old friend Joppy (Mel Winkler) for reasons that are not explained in the film, at least not for quite some time.

 

If you can't convince someone to do what you'd like them to do, resort to blackmail. Easy reluctantly calls in an old friend from down South named Mouse Alexander (Don Cheadle). Rawlins doesn't like to use him very often, for the simple reason that Mouse is a bit psycho and wants an excuse to shoot someone! (He will get his chance.) Easy is even more suspicious when he unearths a few leads that any competent PI should have been able to collect.

 

When in LA, assume political strings will be pulled. There’s a mayoral election and Easy is approached by the incumbent  Mattew Terell (Maury Chaykin) who is obviously trying to pry information from him. Coretta tells Easy that Daphne is staying with gangster Frank Green, but before he can follow up he is arrested for Coretta’s murder, something he knows nothing about, but try explaining that to two homicide agents. Yet he walks free. Nothing seems to make complete sense to Rawlins. Enter Todd Carter (Terry Kinney), a billionaire who dropped out of the race when Daphne, his fiancé disappeared. He offers Easy big bucks to find her. Because of the movie’s elided action, a subplot about pictures of naked boys comes at us pretty fast. So too does Carter’s rejection of Daphne when he finds out she is biracial.

 

Washington plays Easy Rawlins with cool smoothness, though he perhaps overplays it as he often comes off as more detached than hard-boiled. Cheadle comes close to stealing the show with his manic energy and walk-the-razor’s-edge volatility. He actually won a few best supporting actor awards (though not an Oscar). Comic relief is also added by an unnamed “mad gardener” who would level every tree in Easy’s neighborhood if given a chance. In his own way he’s as crazy as Mouse. I also wondered if Daphne was a hard role for Beals to play. She is, in life, a biracial woman born to an African-American father and an Irish-American mother. She has often spoken of experiencing discrimination as a child.

 

By the movie’s end, Easy Rawlins has his own detective agency, so it’s also an origin story. My tag line for Devil in a Blue Dress is “okay movie, much better novel.” I may have said that 5-6,000 times before!

 

Rob Weir