Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

An African-American man is hired to find a woman, and gets mixed up in a murderous political scandal.

Director:

Carl Franklin

Writers:

Walter Mosley (book), Carl Franklin (screenplay)

Stars:

Denzel Washington, Tom Sizemore, Jennifer Beals

3 wins & 13 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Denzel Washington	...	Easy Rawlins
Tom Sizemore	...	Dewitt Albright
Jennifer Beals	...	Daphne Monet
Don Cheadle	...	Mouse Alexander
Maury Chaykin	...	Matthew Terell
Terry Kinney	...	Todd Carter
Mel Winkler	...	Joppy
Albert Hall	...	Odell
Lisa Nicole Carson	...	Coretta James
Jernard Burks	...	Dupree Brouchard
David Fonteno	...	Junior Fornay (as David Wolos-Fonteno)
John Roselius	...	Mason
Beau Starr	...	Miller
Steven Randazzo	...	Benny Giacomo
Scott Lincoln	...	Richard McGee

Storyline

It is 1948 in LA and Ezikeal "Easy" Rawlins, an African-American World War II veteran, is looking for work. At his friend's bar, he is introduced to a white man, DeWitt Albright, who is looking for someone to help him find a missing white woman assumed to be hiding somewhere in LA's Black community. This woman, Daphne Monet, happens to be the fiancée of a wealthy "blue blood," Todd Carter, who is currently the favorite in the city's mayoralty race. Daphne Monet is known to frequent the Black jazz clubs in LA. Easy, innocently, accepts Albright's offer; however, he quickly finds himself amidst murder, crooked cops, ruthless politicians, and brutalizing hoodlums. This is a Chandler-esque "who-done-it" with an African-American theme.

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Plot Keywords:

african american | jazz club | private detective | missing person | jazz music | 

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Taglines:

In a world divided by black and white, Easy Rawlins is about to cross the line.

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Genres:

Crime | Drama | Mystery | Thriller

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated R for violence, sexuality and language

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

29 September 1995 (USA)

Also Known As:

El demonio vestido de azul

Filming Locations:

California, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$27,000,000 (estimated)

Gross USA:

$16,030,096

Company Credits

Production Co:

TriStar Pictures, Clinica Estetico, Mundy Lane Entertainment

Technical Specs

Runtime:

102 min

Sound Mix:

Dolby SR SDDS (8 channels) Dolby Digital

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Poppy Montgomery's film debut.

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Goofs

The scene after Easy and Daphne are in McGee's house (where they find his body), Easy pulls into his driveway and gets out of the car. He looks left to see a gray convertible on the street. When he comes to his front door, the view changes and you see the same car with a (hard) top, over Easy's left shoulder. After the people in the house leave, the car is once again a convertible. Clearly they used two identical cars in this scene. One convertible, one not.

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Quotes

[first lines]
Easy Rawlins: It was summer 1948, and I needed money. 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. 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.

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Connections

Featured in At the Movies: To Die For/Steal Big, Steal Little/Devil in a Blue Dress/Moonlight and Valentino/The Big Green (1995)

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Soundtracks

MAYBE I SHOULD CHANGE MY WAYS
Written by Duke Ellington & John La Touche (as John LaTouche)
Performed by Duke Ellington
Courtesy of Columbia Records
By Arrangement with Sony Music Licensing

User Reviews

Highly regarded, but it's filled with empty nostalgia and clichés galore

Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

I wanted to like this movie. A good friend pressed it forward as a belated view of the black noir experience, and there was such truth that the urban black world hadn't seen any attention in the classic noir days (post-War) I had to watch it.

But this is more belated than anything. It's loaded with clichés without really moving them anywhere new (and a stale cliché is really deadening). The director AND screenwriter, Carl Franklin, is relatively untested—he's done a bunch of t.v. stuff, an African-American with talent as an a actor but a little stretched here, I think. The star does his best to hold it together, none other than Denzel Washington, but in fact even he is following old patterns a bit listlessly. This is really clear when a truly brilliant actor arrives on the scene—Don Cheadle—and in his moments there is finally a rising up and synthesis of intentions.

The plot is almost a given—a detective on the outs faces a terrible crime, and a mysterious woman (call her a femme fatale if you want, but she's too plastic to work for me). He is hounded by a white man (or two) with truly dubious or evil intentions that he can't quite decipher. Until it really gets out of his control.

The book is here is by the much lauded author Walter Mosley, and I only discovered this today (I saw them movie innocently). And I've read one or two things by Mosley and actually found the same problem as the movie: lots of tropes and worn out problems approached in the same old way. Except with black characters.

Now this may be naive, but I think in fact the world of urban Blacks and their crime worlds in mid-Century America is really really ripe for some serious fictional writing. Something without myth making. There must be a black Bogart or Mitchum type out there for those inclined. There's another problem, though, looking back and wishing we had better movies about certain things than we did. Maybe that's just the way it was, and we need new movies about new things, not re-hashed themes that only half make up for what might have been. Or not. We weren't there, and we never can be.

So all good intentions aside, give this movie a skeptical look. It's well enough made and has some tightly made moments, but as a whole it flounders and lacks one of the basics—originality.