Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)
Directed by Carl Franklin
In late 1940s Los Angeles, Easy Rawlins is an unemployed black World War II veteran with few job prospects. At a bar, Easy meets DeWitt Albright, a mysterious white man looking for someone to investigate the disappearance of a missing white woman named Daphne Monet, who he suspects is hiding out in one of the city's black jazz clubs. Strapped for money and facing house payments, Easy takes the job, but soon finds himself in over his head.
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What critics compared Devil in a Blue Dress to
L.A. Confidential has the same kind of freshness as Carl Franklin's underrated Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) and John Dahl's noirs Red Rock West and The Last Seduction.
Like Devil in a Blue Dress, this movie proves that multi- hued film stock does not automatically hamstring such a production.
Carl Franklin’s adaptation of Walter Mosley’s first Easy Rawlins novel bears a strong resemblance to other neo- noir detective movies, like Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) and Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997), substituting the period glow of Southern California sunlight for the chiaroscuro expressionism of classic noir and using the narrative to expose layers of interconnected personal and political corruption.
Precious few have pulled it off, notable favourites being Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential.
Devil in a Blue Dress remains the only adaptation of his works to date, largely because it was a flop at the time, and overshadowed by other works in a similar key at the time, particularly Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997).