Devil in a Blue Dress

Another of the movies that I had the chance to DVR thanks to the free preview of the Showtime channels is Devil in a Blue Dress. Interestingly, this is a movie that's going to be back on TCM instead of on one of the premium channels. That airing is overnight tonight at 2:00 AM, so still late Saturday evening if you're on the west coast.

It's the summer of 1948 in Los Angeles, and Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins is a former GI who served in World War II before being demobbed. He's a native of Texas, but screwing up his personal life there sent him west to Los Angeles looking for work and a fresh start in life. He got that fresh start, but has recently been fired from his job, and with a bunch of bills he's in need of work as he sits in Joppy's (Mel Winkler) bar.

Fortunately for him, there's somebody who could use him for a job that has the promise of a big payday. That somebody is Dewitt Albright (Tom Sizemore). Dewitt is an assistant to one of the candidates for mayor, Todd Carter (Terry Kinney). Except that Carter is planning to drop out because his girlfriend, Daphne (Jennifer Beals), has gone missing. Daphne has been known to spend time in some of the black-owned bars and nightclubs in town, and the hope is that somebody like Easy will be able to find Daphne and bring her back to Carter; obviously, a white person couldn't go into those clubs so discreetly to do the search.

Easy probably ought to realize that such an "easy" job (no pun intended) with that big payoff has to have a catch behind it, but he takes the job anyway since the advance allows him to pay off his bills. At one of the clubs he visits, he sees a friend Dupree, who has a girlfrind Coretta who is thought to know Daphne and can give information as to Daphne's whereabouts. She does know, but Dupree gets so drunk that Easy has to take him and Coretta back to Dupree's house where the three spend the night. It's a bad move because the following day, the cops tell Easy that Coretta was murdered, with him as an obvious suspect.

Of course, we know that Easy didn't do it. But what we don't know yet is that this isn't the last murder, by any means. Amazingly enough for Easy, Daphne calls him from out of the blue, telling him her whereabouts! It's another trap, as Daphne asks Easy to take her to some house up in the Hollywood Hills because she has some important business there. The house owner is dead, and Daphne drives off, leaving Easy there alone and a prime suspect.

The mystery gets more complex, as it turns out that the other mayoral candidate, Terrell (Maury Chaykin) is involved, with compromising pictures of him that Daphne is believed to have in her possession, so everybody wants Daphne, some of them wanting her dead. Easy has to deal with a whole bunch of people who are out for him, including both Carter's and Terrell's men, along with black gangsters and the cops. The finale is pure Hollywood, and frankly unbelievable, but that's another story.

Devil in a Blue Dress is a well-made movie, that unsurprisingly made me think of Chinatown since I watched that one recently and both are complex mysteries set in vintage Los Angeles. Washington is an overarching figure here, and he delivers with a fine performance. The mystery might be a bit confusing at times, but that's why it's a mystery. It's not supposed to be clear.

If there's one flaw -- and it's a minor one -- it's that the movie's view of Los Angeles is a bit too clean. We've got noir footage of Los Angeles as it was back in the late 1940s, and that looks rather grittier. I've stated before that historical movies made in more recent times look better than the stuff done on Hollywood backlots, but I find myself increasingly thinking that any "period" piece set in a time for which we have Hollywood movie footage, especially stuff done off the back lot, tends to look slightly off, as though everybody has a higher standard of living than they would have had in reality.

But that minor flaw is absolutely no reason not to watch Devil in a Blue Dress if you've never seen it before.