Left Field Cinema

Film Noir is considered by many to be a genre of its time, generally speaking we think of Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, 1940’s, 1950’s, private dicks, femme fatals, black and white photography, pronounced shadows and lots of smoking. Away from these stylish Hollywood crime films of 60 and 70 years past and we have the Neo Noir, an altogether rarer beast with few classics to its name and an often differing set of stylistic rules. The advent of colour film did Film Noir no favours, but many film makers like Roman Polanski with his 1974 classic China Town and Curtis Hanson with his 1997 crime epic L.A Confidential, have managed to elude this basic problem with contemporary Noir by ignoring it completely. A film with significantly less profile is Carl Franklin’s 1995 feature film Devil in a Blue Dress, which also ignores the Black and White film and presents a picture very much of the mid 1990’s but is as much a Noir as either of the aforementioned films.

Devil in a Blue Dress stars Denzel Washington as Ezekiel Rawlins (AKA ‘Easy’) a former solider of World War II who recently lost his job and is now worrying that he might lose his house. Easy is something of an oddity in his community, as an African American he is the only man on his street to own his own house. He’s single and upwardly mobile but vulnerable due to his lack of work. One day whilst resting in a bar, a man named DeWitt Albright (as played by Tom Sizemore) offers him a job, Easy hesitates, but the mortgage hangs large over his head, so he agrees to try and find out where a young woman called Daphne Monet is (the titular devil in the titular blue dress as played by Jennifer Beals). As Easy’s investigations begins he soon realises that he’s in over his head as the people he questions about Ms. Monet soon begin meeting violent ends and the local police make Easy their prime suspect. More over Mr. Albright soon reveals himself to be more dangerous than we might have first suspected and the disappearance of Ms. Monet goes right to the centre of the Los Angeles mayoral election. A complex plot line is a genre trapping of Film Noir leading all the way back to films like Howard Hawk’s 1946 classic The Big Sleep or John Huston’s 1941 film the legendary Maltese Falcon; most Neo Noir’s follow in this tradition, L.A Confidential and China Town both dealing in plots which spiral upwards and incriminate higher public officials and powerful business men. Devil in a Blue Dress conforms to genre trappings here, it continues to tread the carefully laid out plan of the films of yesteryear, Easy is in over his head, there is a woman at the centre of the crime, the police are corrupt and there is no honour amongst thieves. Easy is thrown into the lion’s den and must fend for his life. Events unravel quickly and the plot is filled with nifty twists and turns. Franklin’s script based on Walter Mosley’s book is excellently written with snappy dialogue, charming character moments and subtle shifts in allegiances. Mr. Albright for instance is a man we do not trust from the start, even Easy is suspicious of him at first but he speaks to Easy as a man rather than a Negro, later when he arranges to meet Easy in a white area, Easy is ganged up on by a group of young men who think he’s hitting on one of the white girls, Mr. Albright appears from the shadows, draws a gun and threatens the young men before assaulting one of them. We can assume that perhaps Mr. Albright is defending Easy against a race crime rather than protecting the information that Easy has for him. Mr. Albright enjoys intimidating the young men and at gun point he sadistically instructs one man to kiss Easy’s shoes, playing with the power dynamic pleases him, as the young man goes to kiss Easy’s shoes Mr. Albright calls him “sick” and knocks him out before he can do it. Is Mr. Albright challenging the racists, or does he just get off on humiliating others, the fact that he won’t stand by and let the young white man actually go through with kissing a black man’s shoes indicates that actually he is far less tolerant than he lets on. Later as things don’t go Albright’s way he causally calls Easy a “Nigger” and the cold empty heart of a bigot is revealed with all the informality of a casual sentence. Mr. Albright is a good example of how all the characters in Devil in a Blue Dress are not quite what they appear to be.

Easy is also a flawed hero, while a friend of his is asleep in the next room he sleeps with his wife and feels little remorse for his actions. A mentally unstable man in his neighbourhood likes to cut down trees that don’t belong to him, even though this man actually tries to help Easy at one point by warning of an intruder in Easy’s house, Easy continues to chase him away from people’s trees rather than getting to the heart of this man’s problems. Although Easy is a former soldier and knows how to handle himself, he is consistently out of his depth throughout the film, out numbered and out gunned at every turn and reliant on his unstable friend from back east, Mouse (as played by Don Cheadle) to assist him in the more violent activities this particular job requires. Easy is never a tough guy, he’s never a violent thug and when he has to be tough or violent to get to the truth it never quite pan out how he’d like.

Daphne is also a complex femme fatal, her flirting with Easy when he first encounters her conceals a wealth of personal trauma underneath, her relationships with one of the richest men in the city and with a hoodlum who likes to knife fight are both more than what they first appear to be and the eventual revelation about her in the last act is both genuinely surprising and totally logical within the confines of the narrative. Even the aforementioned Mouse, whose ironical nick name helps make him the most memorable character in the film, he doesn’t arrive until over half way through the film but when he does, he does with a bang. Cheadle’s performance as the unhinged borderline psychotic gangster, frankly, steals the entire film. His shoot first ask questions later approach is unnerving and hilarious simultaneously, his unwavering loyalty towards Easy is also a character fault that the writers exploit to maximum effect as he often gets Easy into more trouble by trying to get him out of trouble. Washington and Cheadle play well off each other, Washington is typecast as ever as the slightly flawed hero, but Cheadle in one of his first major roles did well to avoid being typecast as the comical psychopath (with only his part in Steven Soderberg’s Out of Sight in 1998 coming close to this sort of role).

What makes Devil in a Blue Dress special is its unassuming and unpretentious approach. Lacking in irony or post modern tricks, this Neo Noir never dares to play with the conventions of it’s genre to any meaningful level and is all the stronger for it. This is not to imply that contorting or experimenting with genre conventions is always a negative action for a film to partake in, but rather that the emphasis on modernisation of older techniques in cinema can lead to predictable outcomes. In this day and age it is fair to consider a traditional approach to a film like this as a refreshing alternative to the constant and fashionable re-invention of cinema genres. This is also not to say that the film is without a unique selling point, clearly this is one of the only African-American centred Noir’s to date, something of a conscious choice as Franklin himself is also African-American. Not that race changes anything within the Noir framework particularly except adding a layer of racial politics which would otherwise have been absent, what it primarily provides is an extra barrier for Easy to get past as he is tracking a white girl he is constantly risks attention from both the white and black community. The race divide in some respects is at the heart of the film in both the narrative and the central conflict, but it never runs the risk of becoming a race lecture or speechifying the issue to such an extent that it over rides the predominant goal of the film – to entertain.

Visually the film is of course in colour and so dissimilar to it’s predecessors in this regard, but Franklin inherits a number of older Noir tricks and uses them well, an early flashback scene is entered using the traditional “rainy window” dissolve, the same flashback is then exited using a more contemporary straight cut, thus merging the old and the new together. The camera work is singularly simplistic but with occasional flourishes of modernity, for instance when Easy decides to make a kidnapping at a pivotal plot point, the camera work suddenly becomes handheld and increasingly shaky to a point we would not have seen in the 1940’s and 1950’s, but no sooner has this begun, it ends again. Violence is brutal and sharply pointed, a clear contrast with the violence of classic Film Noir, but again this is to be expected in a mid-90’s film and it is never so brutal that it seems completely out of place with the genre. This seems like a natural extension rather than an attempt at playing with genre rules, for example if The Big Sleep had been made today the bullet hits would appear more realistic and the sex more explicit.

Franklin does hit a few problems along the way and his film is not perfect, a somewhat sentimental epilogue leaves a bad taste in the mouth when the end credits roll. Also the theme of property and personal ownership is undercooked and should have been emphasised or excised, as the film stands there are only passing mentions of how special it is that Easy owns a house and Easy’s own voice-over musings about how important his property is to him. These instances do not sit well within the film and they seem to be additions that Franklin hoped would give the film extra significance and do not feel like an organic part of the story. Thankfully these moments are rare and do not spoil the overall enjoyment of what is otherwise a wonderful overlooked gem and a great unsung film for fans of Noir and Neo Noir alike.

M.Dawson