23. Devil in a Blue Dress

Carl Franklin's criminally underheralded 1995 neo-noir film Devil in a Blue Dress made little headway with audiences when it was first released, grossing only $16 million dollars. A crying shame, really, because it's blessed with excellent acting, social commentary, a wonderful sense of style, and perhaps one of the best soundtracks of any film from the 1990s (numerous jump blues songs which not only bring period atmosphere to the film, they comment on the characters and actions).

The plot can summarily be described as Chinatown meets The Big Sleep, as unemployed former factory worker Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington, charismatic as always) takes on some detective work for slimy DeWitt Albright (Tom Sizemore), and becomes involved in a deadly race between two mayoral candidates (Terry Kinney and Maury Chaykin) to find one Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals), the femme fatale of our piece.

What makes the film work is its fresh take on certain noir components. First of all, of course, is its setting in LA's black community in 1948 (which I think is a major reason it didn't catch on with audiences -- for some reason general audiences don't go for African-American period pieces – witness Rosewood, Amistad, and Posse, among many others). Setting it in this era allows for some great plot twists that wouldn't be twists in many other settings, and indeed are twists only because society has changed since the 1940s.

Secondly, unlike most detective films, which follow already-established private eyes, this one shows a man becoming a detective basically against his will, and yet finding it harder to pull out of the situation once he's involved. It's a unique portrayal of the lure of money, power, and the underworld.

And lastly, unlike many stories in which the character is a cynical loner, here Easy is an established member of the black community in LA, and as he progresses deeper into the underworld, his circle gets smaller, which he's helpless to do anything about; as well, the bright LA sun and his house in a nice residential area becomes almost menacing, as they remind him how far he's fallen (it also shows how violence can be going on all around us, and nobody else in the neighborhood is the wiser -- witness Albright and his goons breaking into Easy's house and beating up on him). It's a story about one man's loss of innocence which, when you think about it, could easily be paralleled with America's similar post-World War II society. (Matt Easterbrook)