Cherchez la Femme: Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

The devil in this dress becomes a damsel in distress

Despite the title, Jennifer Beals poses no threat to Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington)

The femme fatale is an essential element of noir, but the idea that seductive women are a danger goes back through mythology and the Bible. In the world of crime fiction, where lust leads men astray, the femme fatale is both irresistible and deadly, a love-sucking vortex that turns longing into dust. There are some heroines and good girls in noir — but the femme fatale is always the most powerful female, even if her characterization is ripe with misogyny. Walter Mosley’s 1990 novel Devil in a Blue Dress centers around the missing femme fatale of the title, but the changes in the film, while humanizing her, also strip away her power.

Walter Mosley had difficulty selling his African American detective series at first, despite the success of other black authors like Chester Himes

THE STORY

The story takes place in 1948 Los Angeles. Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington) having just been laid off from his factory job, agrees to find a missing woman for DeWitt Albright (Tom Sizemore), even though he is wary of working for a white man. The woman is Daphne Monet, a white woman who spends a lot of time in black neighborhoods. Easy asks around for her, but is quickly pulled in by the police after one of Daphne’s friends is found dead. Easy’s quest leads him into the seedy world of politicians, pimps, blackmail and senseless violence while he is suspected of the murder of a white man. When his sociopathic friend Mouse (Don Cheadle) arrives in town, Easy is torn between defending himself and trying to stem the bloodshed that ensues.

Tom Sizemore plays DeWitt Albright as a stereotypical rather than polished gangster, so it’s a little harder to see why the sensible Easy didn’t steer clear of him

THE ADAPTATION

There’s a rhythm to Walter Mosley’s writing that reminds the readers of music. Easy and most of his friends are transplants from the South, and Mosley has a masterful ear for dialect and slang that sounds authentic to the time period. In many ways, the mystery takes a backseat to the social commentary; Easy moves comfortably in his own world but faces physical danger any time leaves it. The twists and turns of the story that propel Easy from one crisis to each other feel complicated and hard to follow; like Chandler, Mosley litters his novel with so many dead bodies that it’s hard to keep the murders straight. And Mosley’s depiction of a femme fatale isn’t fresh or different in anyway; Easy concludes that Daphne Monet brings death everywhere she goes even though it’s only men who bring the violence. The misogyny of noir is strong in the novel, but what saves the story is Easy’s basic integrity and the relatability of his desire for the American dream. Mosley’s novel brought African-American noir fiction to mainstream America, which had usually experience their hardboiled detectives as middle-aged white men. But while Mosley upends the noir conventions of race, he makes fewer changes to its conventions of gender.

In the movie, Denzel Washington is perfectly cast. His Easy Rawlins is by turns cool-headed and hot-tempered, cautious but strong-willed. The movie is shot beautifully, starting with a blues score over the credits and portraying the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles as lively and interdependent communities, full of secrets and spirit. The casting of Jennifer Beals as Daphne Monet has often been criticized, but she is bi-racial, which fits with the storyline even better than Mosley’s description of her. The movie’s rich colors and period setting contrast with the brutality, racism and degeneracy that Easy encounters.

Washington often refused to play love scenes with Caucasian women and this movie was no exception, as the sex scene between Easy and Daphne was excluded from the film

Directed by Carl Franklin, the movie is not nearly as convoluted as Mosley’s mystery, and the changes from film to book rob it of its intensity. The most important change isn’t the casting of Daphne Monet but what the film changes about her character. In the novel, she is on the run having stolen $30,000, on the run after murdering a man; in the film, she is just a beautiful, largely innocent woman in trouble. In the book, Easy is afraid of white cops and black thugs, but more afraid of seductive, unstable women and while Beals is beautiful, she is too one-dimensional for a complex femme fatale who lures mean into darkness. By watering down Daphne’s misdeeds, the film’s depiction of her is less misogynistic than the book but also takes away her power and the fascination she inspire. This, and the elimination of the sex scene between Daphne and Easy, reduces their relationship to an extended conversation rather than an emotional and complicated affair. It also makes his rescue of her more conventionally heroic (which is unnecessary; we already know he’s a good guy) than emotionally driven.

The film also includes the trope of a politician’s dirty pictures being used for blackmail, though it’s never clear how they were taken or why Daphne might have them. While this type of MacGuffin does make sense — the gangsters are working for a politician desperate to recover them— it’s not a powerful enough reason for Daphne to go into hiding (she didn’t take them, and has really done nothing wrong except for being bi-racial). The movie also dispenses with the novel’s denouement where Easy provides the authorities an explanation for the murder that protects Mouse and Daphne. Mouse, a memorable character, is the essence of mindless violence in the book, something that Easy wants to avoid. In the movie, they seem closer, and while Cheadle captures Mouse’s instability and hair-trigger violence, he’s shot mostly in the dark, minimizing the audience’s interactions with him.

Easy (Washington) is far more wary of Mouse (Don Cheadle) in the novel than in the movie.

Devil in a Blue Dress isn’t the first mystery novel with a convoluted, unrealistic plot that succeeds on atmosphere and social commentary; in fact, it simply follows a long tradition started by Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. But while the movie succeeds on the first, it fails on the last, largely because so much of Easy’s inner monologue isn’t incorporated into the script. His war years, for example, are often mentioned in the novel but brushed aside in the movie, which ignores how increasing interactions between postwar white and black communities changed the face of racism. Easy’s investigation reveals that both worlds can be dangerous, but it is only in the latter that he has an identity and any power. In fact, Easy is reliant on the system he hates: he is saved from losing his house by taking a job from Albright, a white gangster (a stereotypically threatening Tom Sizemore) and can only clear his name by convincing a wealthy white man (Terry Kinney) to intercede with the police. If noir is about moral ambivalence and alienation from systems of authority, those elements are doubled in African American crime fiction, where race separates the detective and many of the characters even further from mainstream society.

For Daphne Monet, identity is fluid and conventions are made to be broken or ignored. But while she can move in both white and black communities, she can never truly be accepted by either, and is dangerous to both. In the novel, this makes her the archetypal femme fatale, who, while not exactly evil, is damaged enough to ignore the emotional wreckage she leaves behind. In the movie, race isolates Daphne but doesn’t give her any of the femme fatale’s (admittedly misogynistic) power. She is seductive, but helpless — and certainly not a “devil in a blue dress.” The movie tries to reject the notion of the femme fatale as the source of the protagonist’s woes, but at a cost. Without her ruthless amoral core, Daphne is just another beautiful woman in trouble. It’s the one noir convention the movie betrays, because for a true femme fatale, being ordinary is a fate worse than death.