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.

Mo' Better Blues

Yet another of the movies that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends was the jazz movie Mo' Better Blues. It's going to be on StarzEncore In Black tomorrow at 3:48 PM, so I sat down to watch it and do a review on it here.

A brief prologue set back in 1969 has a young Bleek Gilliam practicing his scales on the trumpet under the tutelage of his mother. Some of his friends are outside the front steps of his house, cajoling him to come out and play ball with them, which makes his mother none too happy, as Bleek goes back to his scales.

Fast forward 20 years. Bleek is now an adult, playing in a jazz combo bearing his name together with saxophonist Shadow (Wesley Snipes), bassist Bottom (Bill Nunn), piano player Left Hand (Giancarlo Esposito), and drummer Rhythm (Jeff Watts). The group is managed by Bleek's childhood friend Giant (Spike Lee, who also directed and wrote the script). The combos seems successful, although Giant and the club's management (brothers played by John and Nick Turturro) worry about Shadow going into solos that run too long. So there is at least a bit of tension within the combo. Left Hand also has a French girlfriend who causes him to show up late at times, and even comes into the dressing room, which is a big no-no.

But the movie is much more about Bleek's life and, on a secondary note, Giant's, than it is about Left Hand. Bleek has a girlfriend in Indigo (Joie Lee), but it turns out that he has a second girlfriend in Clarke Betancourt (Cynda Williams), who is an aspiring singer who would like it if Bleek could put her up on stage to sing with the combo. Now, there's nothing wrong with her wanting to sing, and nothing wrong with having an instrumental combo, except that the two are clearly incompatible. Maybe Clarke could sing with a different combo, but that would bring up its own set of problems.

In fact, Clarke is going to wind up singing with another combo when Shadow begins to chafe under Bleek's leadership, even falling in love with Clarke himself. But that all comes later in the movie, after Clarke and Indigo both find out that Bleek has two girlfriends, thanks to his having bought the same dress for the both of them that they both just happen to wear to the club on the same night, even though Indigo doesn't normally like going to the club. Talk about bad luck, although Bleek brought it upon himself by having two girlfriends in the first place.

In the meantime, we've also got Giant's story. He's not a particularly good manager, having negotiated a bad deal for the combo, which they'd like to renegotiate except that Bleek's name is on the dotted line. That's part of why Shadow things about going out on his own with a new combo. Bleek would like more money although management rightly point out there's that contract. Giant needs more money. He's been betting on baseball, and doing a lousy job of it, because he's fairly heavily in debt to his bookie Petey (Ruben Blades). Giant is unable to pay, resulting in muscle being brought in to try to make him pay.

Mo' Better Blues has a pretty good story, helped out by an unsurprisingly good performance by Denzel Washington. The music is also quite good, even if, like me, you're not the biggest fan of jazz. But one place where I felt the movie was really a let-down was in the direction. Spike Lee used some really intrusive camera movement throughout the movie when static shots would have worked better. There were dizzying pans on several occasions, and one weird sequence that apparently had Bleek on a turntable in his own apartment as the camera stayed on his face while the background did a 360-degree rotation. Sure, the camera doesn't have to be stationary all the time the way it was in those early talkies of filmed plays, but the choices for moving the camera around here were, I thought, too frequent and at the wrong times.

But for peole for whom such camera movement isn't an issue, they'll definitely love Mo' Better Blues.