“A man once told me that you step out of your door in the morning, and you are already in trouble. The only question is: Are you on top of that trouble or not?” says Easy Rawlings in the remarkable “Devil in a Blue Dress” (1995). I’m so excited I rediscovered this gem. I had seen it the first day it opened for I was a big fan of director Carl Franklin’s film “One False Move” – an independent crime thriller he did in 1992, co-written by Billy Bob Thornton. The latter was one of those rare instances where the movie keeps getting better as it goes along – and Franklin’s directing gets more assured as well. It felt like nothing I’d seen before – and I was enlightened to see a film that showed what it was like to navigate between the color lines in this country. I was so pleased to see him helm a few episodes of season 2 of the masterful David Fincher’s “Mindhunter” series. I’ve wanted to recommend “One False Move” but I haven’t been able to find it. There I was searching for it, and I stumbled last night unto “Devil in a Blue Dress” – Franklin’s big studio follow-up. It was well-received by critics upon its release, but it didn’t do well at the box office. Well, this film is such a revelation. I rarely come across something like this – a movie that has gotten so much richer than that first viewing. I remember liking it, now I love it. Most importantly, its subject and the issues it grapples with have become more urgent than ever.
Franklin wrote the adaptation of Walter Mosley’s hardboiled mystery novel of the same name. It takes place in 1948 in the Watts area of Los Angeles. Ezekiel Rawlins (played by a when-is-he-not magnetic Denzel Washington) who lost his job unfairly at the Los Angeles Aviation defense plant, has not paid two months of his mortgage. “After goin’ door-to-door all day long, I was back again at Joppy’s bar trying to figure out where I was gonna go looking for work the next day,” he narrates. The owner of the bar introduces him to DeWitt Albright who needs him to find a young white woman who has been known to frequent “juke joints” along Central Avenue. Easy is torn about getting involved in something that doesn’t feel right, but he needs the money. He runs into old friends from his life in Houston – Coretta and Dupree. Coretta knows where Daphne is. As it turns out she sends him on a fool’s errand, Coretta is murdered – and he gets questioned by the police. It is revealed that Daphne is involved with the upcoming mayoral election – and he starts to unravel a very complicated undercurrent in the city – which involves racism. “The newspapers was goin’ on and on about the city elections, like they was really gonna change somebody’s life. But my life had already changed when I lost my job three weeks before,” Easy elucidates.
You’ve seen many mysteries like this before, but you haven’t seen one where the detective is African American and he’s pushed to becoming one by the bigotry surrounding him. We witness him realizing his calling. Halfway through the movie, and it’s an exhilarating moment, he has no choice but to solve the mystery. “Guess they figured I was some new kind of fool, and maybe I was. ‘Cause I was ready to start fighting back. And I believed somehow that I could live through this bad dream I was having,” he tells us.
I greatly admire Franklin’s ambition. Here is his attempt to do his version of “Chinatown” – uncovering deep layers of societal corruption. His recreation of a black neighborhood in the 40s is such a visual treat. He relishes in showing Central Avenue at night the way it was – with a long uninterrupted take that goes from one side of the street to the other as it follows Easy to the juke joint. Once we enter, it’s quite a vision of color, smoke and jazz. It’s such a vivid atmosphere. In almost every scene, there’s racial discrimination. Details are given throughout. A casual conversation with a neighbor who’s packed her belongings and is leaving Los Angeles. “People not being able to afford their homes,” she says. Franklin does another long take as Easy is taken in for interrogation – later on Easy comments about the games that cops and African Americans play with each other.
There’s also one aspect of the narrative that needs to be singled out. It’s the introduction late in the story to of one of the wildest and most refreshing characters I’ve seen in a while. Easy enlists the help of his old friend “Mouse” from Houston. He’s a live-wire – a trigger-happy loyal – hard-drinking – loose canon. He is one of the most unpredictable sidekicks in movie history. He’s played with gusto by a young Don Cheadle. We understand there’s a back story to Mouse that we don’t get to see. He’s also part of a sequence that is poignant – so well realized and directed. It involves the first person that Easy sees dying as a new detective. The moment is sobering – and rare in a film noir.
I could go on and on telling you about his film, but better hold back so I don’t spoil things or hype it up too much. Washington is as reliable as ever. Jennifer Beals does a fine job as the femme fatale who – yes – wears a blue dress.
Easy: “If you got a friend that you know does bad things, I mean real bad things, and you still keep him as a friend even though you know what he’s like, do you think that’s wrong?”
Love,
Roger
Available to stream on Hulu, Sling TV, Starz and Amazon Prime. Available to rent on Vudu, YouTube, iTunes, Google Play, FandangoNOW, Redbox, Apple TV, Microsoft, Amazon Prime and DIRECTV.
Screenplay by Carl Franklin
Based on the book by Walter Mosley
Directed by Carl Franklin
Starring Denzel Washington, Tom Sizemore, Jennifer Beals, Don Cheadle and Maury Chaykin
102 minutes
Bringing “Devil in a Blue Dress” to the Screen
With a budget of $22 million, “Devil in a Blue Dress” cost considerably more than any of Franklin’s previous works (“One False Move” was made for $2.5 million). It has a bluesy score, a rich, powerful narrative engine and a burnished finish; as a result, it is a smooth approximation of such classic Hollywood detective yarns as “The Big Sleep” and “The Maltese Falcon.” But Franklin has done much more than remake old Hollywood with a black cast. Like “One False Move” and “Laurel Avenue,” his film resonates with Franklin’s personal experience; his works are always marked by their search for the “feeling of something real.”…Franklin recalls first seeing Mosley’s mystery bestseller during the shoot for “One False Move” in 1990. “My producer Jesse Beaton gave me the book, and immediately I began to see scenes in my head, to envision the places where the action takes place. Inside my head, it already wanted to be a movie.”…”Creativity comes from the invisible,” Franklin observes. “The movies you make are the cumulative result of everything you have experienced. You make the kind of movies that you can make, basically. I have no desire to make ‘Mary Poppins.’ The world has not presented itself to me that way.” (latimes.com) “A wider variety of scripts came across my desk than came to other filmmakers. I was offered every kind of movie — from love stories to action movies to suspense terror to political drama. Disney even wanted me to do a version of ‘That Darn Cat.’ “What attracted Franklin to Mosley’s story was the universal quality of its protagonist, Easy Rawlins. “Easy isn’t just a black character,” Franklin explains. “He’s Everyman — his concerns are everyone’s concerns. He’s not blessed with superhuman powers and he’s got to pay his mortgage. A lot of people these days are in exactly the same boat.” (washingtonpost.com)
The Making of “Devil in a Blue Dress”
In Washington’s eyes, Franklin brought an unusually meditative quality to his material. “He’s really a history professor trapped in a movie director’s body,” says the actor. “You know he’s always going to get deep into things.” Before filming began, Franklin lent Washington some 1940s family photos that his casting director, Victoria Thomas, had brought in for research purposes. One picture showed two young black teenagers standing on a front porch, looking like they had their whole future ahead of them. “It’s hard to say what’s so powerful about a photo like that–it’s just a vibe you get,” Washington says. “But when I saw those kids, I ran over to Don Cheadle, who plays Mouse, and I said, ‘Man, look at this picture. This is us!’ ” To industry insiders, who love to tag films with a convenient label, “Devil in a Blue Dress” has been described as “a black ‘Chinatown.’ ” Like the Robert Towne-written classic, “Devil” has a detective hero who finds himself immersed in a web of dark, unseen forces, including ambitious politicians with something to hide and a mysterious femme fatale with hidden family secrets. But to Franklin, the film has a more old-fashioned hook–it’s a story about a black man coming of age, trying to get his piece of the American dream. “Easy has to make a pact with the devil to save his house, which to him represents everything about the opportunities he was fighting for during World War II. By the end of the story, Easy has learned the world is a very complicated place, where you can’t wait for things to come to you. You have to go out and get them.”…From early on, it was obvious that of the short list of bankable black actors, Denzel Washington was the right man to play Easy Rawlins. “Denzel is deceptive,” Franklin says. “You always see him play these highbrow guys–doctors and lawyers–but he’s actually a very down-home guy. And I think he brought a lot of that earthiness and charm to Easy’s character.” (latimes.com)
Director and Co-Writer Carl Franklin on Adapting “Devil in a Blue Dress” for the Screen
The challenge that is always there in turning a book into a film is that in a book, you can have an internal conflict within a character while in a film, the conflicts have to be between the characters so that there is something to see and so that you can have the visual component. What is interesting is that Walter Moseley had written a few drafts of it—I think it had been at Universal—and they had sent him down a very difficult road because they wanted to combine the characters of Easy and Mouse so that Easy would become more of a traditional Hollywood take-charge kind of character. So Mouse was not even in the draft that I read. Jesse and I were in Minneapolis shooting “Laurel Avenue,” which was a HBO miniseries, and she saw that Walter was going to be at a book signing. We raced over there that night and she had her books for him to sign and I was there. When we got to the head of the line, I asked him why he had taken Mouse out of the screenplay and he said “How did you read my script?” I told him I had seen it and he was very happy to let me write it because they had put him through so many obstacles and hurdles during its development at Universal. In the meantime, a woman named Donna Gigliotti helped us get it out of there and we got it over to Sony, where they allowed me to do the script. (rogerebert.com)
Franklin on the Look and Inspirations Behind “Devil in a Blue Dress”
“The Big Sleep” was the movie in terms of the look that I wanted. Tak Fujimoto was the cinematographer and I told him that I wanted it to look like black and white in color, to have that feel. One of the things that we did was we desaturated everything. We had no real primary colors, just a lot of earth tones with the girl in the blue dress being the only really vivid color. We beat everything down in the wardrobe and we tried to select what we shot. That was one of the things that Coppola did on “The Godfather”—instead of using a lot of filters, they actually made sure that they shot orange and black. That was one of the things that we decided to do—to shoot certain colors—so that it would have a certain immediacy while at the same time help make the period look seem convincing. I decided to approach it more as social realism because I figured that the noir would take care of itself because the elements were there. It wasn’t really like we tried to have the lights and moonlight streaming through the blinds and cigarette smoke and the kinds of things you normally associate with the stereotypical visual elements of noir. We kind of felt that if we used pools of light and kept things dark and contrasty and muted, the world that we saw would take care of itself. (rogerebert.com)
About Director and Co-Writer Carl Franklin
Franklin grew up in Richmond, Calif., a suburb of San Francisco; his father died before he was born. His stepfather was a carpenter and his mother was a housewife. Where he grew up, he remembers, violence and crime were all around him, but somehow he was lucky. After winning a scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley in 1967, Franklin began to haunt the theater department because “a friend told me all the best girls were in drama.” Immediately after graduation he headed for New York, where he landed acting jobs, including at the New York Shakespeare Festival and at Lincoln Center. During the early ’70s, he worked at Arena Stage, appearing in productions of “Twelfth Night” and “Pantagleize.” Then came a host of lackluster TV projects: In the short-lived “Caribe,” he starred with Stacy Keach; they played detectives in the Caribbean. There was a series with Roddy McDowall called “Fantastic Journey.” In 1982, he did “McClain’s Law” with James Arness; he later landed a regular gig on “The A-Team,” which he quit after only two years. “I was really disgusted with the profession,” says Franklin…In the meantime, he got married, and had two kids…Eventually, he became so disillusioned with acting that he began to look for something more “viable.” In 1986 he was accepted by the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. (washingtonpost.com)…He won awards for his master’s thesis film, “Punk,” which earned him work directing a pair of features with Roger Corman’s Concorde Films. In 1991, he directed “One False Move,” a low-budget thriller for IRS Films, which sat on the shelf for a year before gaining a theatrical release. Virtually broke, Franklin took a job teaching at AFI just to make ends meet. It was only when “One False Move” earned a host of critical plaudits that Franklin’s career finally took off, bolstered by the warm reaction to his acclaimed HBO miniseries “Laurel Avenue.” (latimes.com)A few of Franklin’s other films include “One True Thing,” “High Crimes,” “Out of Time,” Last of the Ninth,” and “Bless Me, Ultima.” Franklin has also directed for television including shows such as “Partners,” “Rome,” “The Riches,” “The Pacific,” “Falling Skies,” “Magic City,” “The Newsroom,” “House of Cards,” “Homeland,” “The Affair,” “Bloodline,” “Vinyl,” “Good Behavior,” “13 Reasons Why,” “Ray Donovan,” “I Am the Night,” and most recently “Mindhunter.”