Devil in a Blue Dress
Brief Synopsis
Cast & Crew
Carl Franklin
Denzel Washington
Tom Sizemore
Don Cheadle
Jennifer Beals
Steve Sekely
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
It's 1948 and Los Angeles is booming, but Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins has seen better days. A decorated World War II veteran, he's just been fired and he's got house payments to make, so when he's offered a job locating the mysterious Daphne Monet, he doesn't waste much time saying yes. Now, he finds himself drawn into a web of murder, blackmail, brutal cops and city politics.
Director
Carl Franklin
Cast
Denzel Washington
Tom Sizemore
Don Cheadle
Jennifer Beals
Steve Sekely
Kai Lennox
Steven Randazzo
Jernard Burks
Nigel Gibbs
Matthew Barry
Maury Chaykin
David Wolos-fonteno
Kenny Endoso
Brazylia Kotere
Poppy Montgomery
Jeris Lee Poindexter
Brian E O'neal
Renee Humphrey
Mel Winkler
Albert Hall
Terry Kinney
Brendan Kelly
J D Smith
L. Scott Caldwell
Frank Davis
Nicky Corello
Robert J Knoll
Barry Shabaka Henley
Beau Starr
Lisa Nicole Carson
Gary S Isbell
G Smokey Campbell
Peggy Rea
Joseph Latimore
Deborah Lacey
Vinny Argiro
Mark Cotone
Scott Lincoln
John Roselius
Crew
David Alstadter
Carole Kravetz Aykanian
Jesse B'franklin
Alan Baptiste
Matt Barry
Elmer Bernstein
Emilie A Bernstein
Stu Bernstein
Martine Beswicke
Cynthia Black
Will Blount
Gary Bourgeois
Bradley J Bovee
Marty Branscomb
Alex Brown
Malcolm Brown
Tony Brubaker
Tony Brubaker
Sam Bruskin
Courtney Byrd
Martin Charles
Renee Clare
Russell Clark
Cody Cluff
J C Cole
Mark Cotone
James M. Cox
Claudette Cucci
John Cucci
Karen M Davis
Sharen Davis
Vince Deadrick
Ronald Dellums
Jonathan Demme
Michael Dressel
Kathy Durning
Yusef G Edmonds
Will Ehbrecht
Mitchell El-mahdy
Jerry Enright
Pablo Ferro
Chris Figler
Anne C. Ford
Carl Franklin
Katterli Frauenfelder
Gary Frutkoff
Tak Fujimoto
Tak Fujimoto
Jessica Gallavan
Stephen Gelber
Alex Gibson
Donna Gigliotti
Gary Goetzman
Cheryle Grace
Moonstar Greene
Robert Grieve
Ira M Hammons-glass
Dick Hancock
Barbara Harris
Monica Haynes
Dwayne Henkel
Mo Henry
Brent Lon Herschman
Tracey Hinds
Joy Hooper
Nancy Duvall Horne
S Beth Horton
Thomas Imperato
Marisol Jimenez
Kathy Mcdonald Jones
Robin Jorden
Mark Lanza
Christopher Lee
Jim Lewis
Stephanie Liner
Mark "travis" Little
Hector Lopez
Stephanie Lowry
Ricardo Lozier
Steve Mann
Chris Martin
Linda Martin-spelta
Jeanne Mccarthy
Vinita Mcclennon
Dwayne Mcgee
Roy Mclaughlin
Peter Mcmanus
Wayne Middleton
Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley
John Murray
Jacqueline Nadler
Eric Oliver
Joel Osborne
Kathryn Peters
Ken Peterson
Lauren Polizzi
Monica Ragan
David Rogow
Bobby Rose
Erich Rose
Riki Lin Sabusawa
Kirk Saduski
P Scott Sakamoto
P Scott Sakamoto
Greg Sanger
Edward Saxon
John-clay Scott
Roy Seeger
Ken Segal
Tony Selznick
Douglas Shamburger
Steven Shareshian
Edna M Sheen
Dan Sherman
Jason Sica
Charles Skouras
Cheryl T Smith
Chris Snyder
Baird Steptoe
D Stevens
Cathy Sutton
Bruce Talamon
Gary Tandrow
Vickie Thomas
Gwynn Turnbull
Christa Vausbinder
Ken Walker
Tyrone S Walker
Dan Wallin
Tom Ward
Fatima Washington
Big Daddy Wayne
Daniel R Webster
John Wehn
Annie Welles
Darryl Lemont Wharton
Gina White
Randy Wiggins
Ralph Winiger
Wayne Witherspoon
Shawn Woodyard
Dan Yale
Mira Zavidowsky
Videos
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Hosted Intro
Film Details
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Articles
Devil in a Blue Dress
Set in Los Angeles in the forties, the film opens as Easy Rawlins, a recently unemployed aircraft plant worker, goes looking for work so he can pay his house mortgage. Desperate for money, he agrees to help find the missing Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals) for a shady businessman named De Witt Albright (Tom Sizemore). It turns out that Daphne is the girlfriend of the current frontrunner for city mayor, Todd Carter (Terry Kinney). And as Easy tries to track Daphne down he finds himself caught up in the middle of a dangerous political rivalry where he is being set up as a fall guy. As a safety precaution he recruits his gun-happy friend Mouse (Don Cheadle) as backup support and eventually uncovers the mystery surrounding Daphne as the bodies pile up.
Universal first acquired the rights to Devil in a Blue Dress and hired Walter Mosley to adapt his own novel for the screen but the author soon realized it was not his forte and went back to writing fiction; the project languished in preproduction limbo until director Jonathan Demme entered the scene. He bought the rights with the intention to direct until he learned that Carl Franklin was also deeply interested in the project. Demme had just seen Franklin's critically acclaimed crime drama, One False Move (1992), and agreed to partner with him on Devil. With Franklin secured as director, Demme then pitched the project to Mike Medavoy, the chairman of Tri-Star, who approved it, and Denzel Washington's involvement as star and co-producer followed soon after that.
In Denzel Washington: His Films and Career by Douglas Brode, the actor stated his reasons for wanting to play Easy: "We'd never really seen South-Central Los Angeles from that time, so it was fresh territory...It was real!. Easy's a regular guy who's in over his head in a crazy situation. When I'm down at the station, being questioned by the police, I'm scared. It's how you react in real life - you're not so tough when you got a billy club up the side of your head." The decision not to play Easy as a tough guy detective in the Humphrey Bogart mold was, in fact, true to the character in Mosley's novel; he was just an ordinary guy who was out of work and needed money. He wasn't a private eye but he had a natural cunning and keen survival skills.
Prior to filming Franklin scouted out locations for the film and found a four block section of Main Street in downtown Los Angeles, near Pico, that could be redressed for period city scenes. But Easy's neighborhood had to be recreated since the original community had long since been destroyed in the Watts riots.
Franklin also immersed himself in the period through photo research and by interviewing jazz musicians and other Los Angeles residents from the late forties who recalled the vivid nightlife and bustling community that existed at the intersection of Central Avenue and 103rd Street back then. "He's really a history professor trapped in a movie director's body," Washington said of Franklin. "You know he's always going to get deep into things." In addition to capturing the forties atmosphere, Franklin puts a new spin on certain detective film stereotypes. Daphne, who at first looks like the standard femme fatale, turns out to be a tragic heroine with a secret identity. And Mouse could easily represent Easy's dark side, the sort of homicidal, criminally-minded character he might have become if he had chosen a different path.
"Film Noir is one of my favorite genres," Franklin later stated in an interview, "although I don't think you need to approach it as a genre when you do it....I like detective kind of things. But what I never liked about them is the inaccessibility of the characters. Usually they're people that you never run into in real life. You know, where does [Philip] Marlowe live? Who's his mom? Where did he come from?...The thing about these people is that they were all people I had seen before. Easy lives in a neighborhood."
When Devil in a Blue Dress opened theatrically, it received mostly positive reviews from the nation's leading critics. Time reviewer Richard Schickel wrote "Carl Franklin's cool, expert adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress...evokes the spirit of '40s film noir more effectively than any movie since Chinatown [1974]" and added that Denzel Washington as Easy "gracefully reanimates a lost American archetype, the lonely lower-class male absorbing more cigarette smoke, bourbon whiskey and nasty beatings than is entirely healthy, as he pursues miscreants and moral imperatives down mean, palm-lined streets." Washington's performance deserved to be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar® but the film was virtually ignored by the Academy voters, even Don Cheadle's scene-stealing supporting role as the wildly unpredictable Mouse.
Budgeted at $20 million dollars, Devil in a Blue Dress only took in $16 million at the box office which was a great disappointment for Franklin, Washington and everyone else who worked on the film as a labor of love. Mosley fans were disappointed too because the film's financial failure meant no more Easy Rawlins movies - A Red Death, White Butterfly, and Black Betty have yet to make it to the big screen. Denzel Washington later commented on the film's inability to attract a wide audience: "They say period pieces are [a] hard [sell]. We also opened the weekend of the O.J. Simpson verdict, which didn't help. But making fifty million dollars the first weekend is not the criterion for whether it's a good film." Devil in a Blue Dress is more than a good film and easily ranks among the best work that Franklin, Washington and Cheadle have done.
Producer: Jesse Beaton, Gary Goetzman
Director: Carl Franklin
Screenplay: Carl Franklin, Walter Mosley (book)
Cinematography: Tak Fujimoto
Film Editing: Carole Kravetz
Art Direction: Dan Webster
Music: Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Hanighen
Cast: Denzel Washington (Easy Rawlins), Tom Sizemore (DeWitt Albright), Jennifer Beals (Daphne Monet), Don Cheadle (Mouse Alexander), Maury Chaykin (Matthew Terell), Terry Kinney (Todd Carter).
C-102m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning.
by Jeff Stafford
SOURCES:
Denzel Washington: His Films and Career by Douglas Brode
Devil in a Blue Dress
Elmer Bernstein (1922-2004)
Elmer Bernstein, who was not related to Leonard Bernstein, was born on August 4, 1922, in New York City. He displayed a talent in music at a very young age, and was given a scholarship to study piano at Juilliard when he was only 12. He entered New York University in 1939, where he majored in music education. After graduating in 1942, he joined the Army Air Corps, where he remained throughout World War II, mostly working on scores for propaganda films. It was around this time he became interested in film scoring when he went to see William Dieterle's The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), a film whose score was composed by Bernard Herrmann, a man Bernstein idolized as the ideal film composer.
Bernstein, who originally intended to be a concert pianist and gave several performances in New York after being discharged from military service, decided to relocate to Hollywood in 1950. He did his first score for the football film Saturday's Hero (1950), and then proved his worth with his trenchant, moody music for the Joan Crawford vehicle Sudden Fear (1952). Rumors of his "communist" leanings came to surface at this time, and, feeling the effects of the blacklist, he found himself scoring such cheesy fare as Robot Monster; Cat Women of the Moon (both 1953); and Miss Robin Caruso (1954).
Despite his politics, Otto Preminger hired him to do the music for The Man With the Golden Arm, (1955) in which Frank Sinatra played a heroin-addicted jazz musician. Fittingly, Bernstein used some memorable jazz motifs for the film and his fine scoring put him back on the map. It prompted the attention of Cecil B. De Mille, who had Bernstein replace the ailing Victor Young on The Ten Commandments (1956). His thundering, heavily orchestrated score perfectly suite the bombastic epic, and he promptly earned his first Oscar® nod for music.
After The Ten Commandments (1956), Bernstein continued to distinguish himself in a row of fine films: The Rainmaker (1956), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Some Came Running (1958), The Magnificent Seven (a most memorable galloping march, 1960); To Kill a Mockingbird (unique in its use of single piano notes and haunting use of a flute, 1962); Hud (1963); earned a deserved Academy Award for the delightful, "flapper" music for the Julie Andrews period comedy Thoroughly Modern Mille (1967), and True Grit (1969).
His career faltered by the '80s though, as he did some routine Bill Murray comedies: Meatballs (1980) and Stripes (1981). But then director John Landis had Bernstein write the sumptuous score for his comedy Trading Places (1983), and Bernstein soon found himself back in the game. He then graced the silver screen for a few more years composing some terrific pieces for such popular commercial hits as My Left Foot (1989), A River Runs Through It (1992) and The Age of Innocence (1993). Far From Heaven, his final feature film score, received an Oscar® nomination for Best Score in 2002. He is survived by his wife, Eve; sons Peter and Gregory; daughters Emilie and Elizabeth; and five grandchildren.
by Michael T. Toole
Elmer Bernstein (1922-2004)
Quotes
Trivia
Miscellaneous Notes
Nominated for the eighth annual (1995) Scripter Award, given by the Friends of the University of Southern California Libraries, for the best film adaptation of a book.
Winner of the 1995 award for Best Supporting Actor (Don Cheadle) from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
Winner of the 1995 awards for Best Supporting Actor (Don Cheadle) and Best Cinematography from the National Society of Film Critics.
Released in United States Fall September 29, 1995
Released in United States November 1995
Released in United States on Video April 2, 1996
Released in United States September 1995
Shown at London Film Festival November 2-19, 1995.
Shown at San Sebastian Film Festival (in competition) September 14-23, 1995.
Began shooting March 21, 1994.
Completed shooting June 20, 1994.
Mundy Lane is actor Denzel Washington's production company.
Released in United States on Video April 2, 1996
Released in United States September 1995 (Shown at San Sebastian Film Festival (in competition) September 14-23, 1995.)
Released in United States Fall September 29, 1995
Released in United States November 1995 (Shown at London Film Festival November 2-19, 1995.)