MOVIE REVIEW

Movie Review On “Devil In A Blue Dress”



Movie Review On “Devil In A Blue Dress”

The Devil in a Blue Dress (Devil in a Blue Dress) is a film directed by Carl Franklin, released in 1995. Neo-noir film released in the middle 90s, The Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) is a thriller starring the investigation of Ezekiel Rawlins (Denzel Washington), detective improvised in the Los Angeles post War, an investigation that confronts racism and the most sordid crimes. Rewarded for his photography and his actors, the film does not win a critical success at the box office (Cook, Pam, 2007).

First, let's get my bias out-of-the-way. The 1995 adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress remains a favorite of mine on various levels. Carl Franklin is a major part of that as he not only directed it, but performed the screen adaptation from the novel he held in high regard. Plus, the source novel by Walter Mosley itself struck its own chord of relevance in crime fiction with its distinct perspective that spoke too many of the disenfranchised when it first appeared back in 1990. The book (and the film) presented the ugly racial reality as it told its late-40s mystery and presented a much different backdrop to the beautiful Los Angeles “they were selling'” (to paraphrase James Ellroy). Even with the changes Franklin made to the original story for filming; it did not amend that crucial viewpoint. In all honestly, the peaks at social realism, which was part, of the background in such well-known crime classics of L.A. like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential (also top picks of mine), is very much front stage in Devil in a Blue Dress by comparison. It is no question that is its strength and weight, I think. Like the noir classics, I've mentioned, this film captures and holds the City of Angels in another time and it becomes an additional character in the picture's narrative. This is not the prewar city of Roman Polanski's Chinatown where the behind the scenes brokers were beginning to flex their power, nor it is the same place struggling to throw off the corruption of its police force years later during the 50s as was on display in Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential. No, this was Los Angeles' post-World War II era. The period recognized for its influx of out-of-state migrants, and it is reflected with clarity in the film (Hagener, Malte, Töteberg, Michael, 2002). All of the out-of-towners treated as outsiders (especially when they competed for the same local jobs), and for clear reasons other than just where they came from. It is that status the former Houston, Texas native Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington in a role tailor-made for him) is well aware of.

Daphne: “Are you nervous?”

Easy: [to himself] Nervous? Here, I was in the middle of the night, in a white neighborhood, with a white woman in my car. No, I was not nervous. I was stupid (Hagener, Malte, Töteberg, Michael, ...