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Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

A review by Damian Cannon.
Copyright © Movie Reviews UK 1997
Reviving the long dormant genre of film noir, Devil in a Blue Dress has both the required feel (with a character-driven, convoluted detective plot) and the correct period (Los Angeles, 1948). By themselves these are not enough to produce a good film, but in the hands of Carl Franklin the story of how Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington) became a PI seduces our attention. The immediate concerns for Easy are that he's just lost his job, as a machinist, and that, subsequently, he can't keep up the mortgage payments on his home. Since there is little work available in this post-war era Easy sits in a bar, run by his friend Joppy (Mel Winkler), drinking whisky and worrying. Hence Easy is interested when Dewitt Albright (Tom Sizemore), a white man in a black bar, offers him an easy $100 - all Easy has to do is locate Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals). Why ask him? Well, Daphne has a predilection for 'dark meat', if you get Dewitt's drift.

Easy knows that there's more to this offer than meets the eye, particularly as Daphne is the fiancée of mayoral candidate Todd Carter (Terry Kinney). Still, $100 is a few bills paid and just how hard can it be to play at Private Dick for a few days? Easy starts off asking questions at a local joint, familiar to him, and ends up going home with Coretta James (Lisa Nicole Carson) and her dead-drunk lover Dupree Brouchard (Jernard Burks). One thing leads to another and soon they're 'hitting each others spot' while Dupree sleeps in the next room, with the result that Coretta tells Easy where Daphne is staying. The information is passed onto Dewitt, who wants Easy to keep working. Unfortunately (before he can do this) Easy is pounced upon by two police detectives and dragged away for questioning - Coretta has been brutally murdered and he's the prime suspect.

In rapid succession, Easy is beaten by the police, let go, picked up by another mayoral candidate, Matthew Terell (Maury Chaykin), let go, phoned by Daphne [how did she get his number?] and then summoned to the Ambassador Hotel. Since she wants to be taken to Todd Carter then surely the chase is nearly over for Easy? Not quite though, as Daphne also wants to be taken to see a man called Richard McGhee (Scott Lincoln) along the way. He lives a fair way out, in a "white" area, and just happens to have been murdered before they arrive. The bodies are starting to pile up around Easy now and he's still no nearer to uncovering the mystery, and structure, behind the events occurring. Calling in the assistance of his trigger-happy friend Mouse (Don Cheadle) helps, but not always in the way that live-and-let-live Easy would prefer.

This is some stylish picture. The buildings look right, the extras look right, even the light is just perfect (although why are all the cars in an as-new condition and sparkling clean?) - put together these give a deeply authentic feel to the action. Washington doesn't let us down with his portrayal of Easy either; he is immensely natural as an everyday, hard-working black guy in the 40s (who knows when to keep his head down). The remainder of the cast is fine although it's simple to see why Washington has the power, in Hollywood, to hold an entire film by himself. The weak points are that the storyline is a little too complex and not entirely compelling or convincing, partly as a result of being tied up so completely at the end. The racial aspects also seem a little underplayed - racism is rampant in these times yet nobody seems to react to it, although maybe that's exactly how it was for coloured people at that time. Finally, I found a fair fraction of the dialogue to be difficult to discern, a result of the soundtrack and the accents, although this may only have been a problem with the print I saw. Generally though, Devil in a Blue Dress is an entertaining, exciting and watchable piece of modern noir.

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