Film 10: Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)

If you’re reading this in the UK, there’s a fair chance you haven’t seen this film, at least not in the cinema because it got a criminally limited release here.  I’m not sure if this is because it didn’t do so well in the US (it was a critical success but not hugely successful financially) or because the studios thought it wouldn’t attract audiences here.

It’s a pity as it’s a note-perfect period piece based on the first of the Easy Rawlins crime novels by Walter Mosley.

Set in 1948 Los Angeles, it’s an origin story of how Ezekiel ‘Easy’ Rawlins who, a few years after returning from military service in Europe in WWII, goes from being an unemployed ex-aircraft company worker to becoming a private detective.

Denzel Washington plays Easy in one of my favourite of his performances to date – you get to see great character development in Washington’s performance – Easy is literally uneasy at the start of the story but grows in confidence throughout the film and transforms from an uncertain but good man down on his luck to a much more confident operator.

The plot is complex and interweaving, befitting the film noir notes it plays to.  Easy is brought in to the story by a man called Albright (Tom Sizemore) who hires Easy to search for a white woman called Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals) Easy is chosen as he can search for Monet in the African-American clubs and bars she has a predilection for visiting, clubs where the white Albright would stand out.  Sizemore plays the deeply unpleasant Albright with such relish that you truly hope he’s acting, it’s a great performance from him though, in the way he has of playing initially likeable unpleasant guys – or at least guys so amoral you decide later you can’t like them (like the bit in Heat where his character picks up a small girl as a human shield while running from a shoot-out).

Easy initially searches from within his close community, not yet knowing the dangers and not yet knowing the risk that he is putting people in by doing so.  There are strong political elements at play in the background, although later central to the plot, which seem innocuous at first but become more relevant as the film continues.

The plot has twists, turns and revelations worthy of The Big Sleep and it would be a crime to reveal too much to you as there is a lot worth discovering for yourself for the first time. Suffice it to say that each plot turn takes the story deeper (and higher) into LA society and Easy (and anyone associated with the plot) further in to danger.

There are of course murders, double-crosses and the classic detective story uncertainty of whom to trust, who is working for who (and are they who they seem to be?)  There are a pair of LAPD cops trying to pin one of the murders on Easy and the film is uncompromising in showing the brutality, venality and racism of the LAPD at the time, themes echoed in the film LA Confidential (and in reality of course).

In the background to the main plot it’s made clear that life is getting tougher for African-Americans in LA – the WWII factory boom encouraged people to move up from the southern states like Texas (as Easy did) but it’s implied this can’t be sustained and that people are starting to move out. Easy himself spends parts of the film fending off an itenerant woodchopper from cutting down the neighbourhood trees, I’m guessing for fuel.

The story gets more complicated and involving as it deepens – we get hints to Easy’s past in Texas before WWII and references to a less than reliable friend named ‘Mouse’ Alexander.  He of course gets brought in to the story later on and Don Cheadle’s performance as Mouse was one of the critically acclaimed parts of the film (and justly so as it’s very good).

Mouse is one of those characters in a novelist’s arsenal – like a personal shotgun.  Shoot too soon and they are wasted, wait until the right moment to use them and they are just damn perfect – in this film (and of course the orignal novel) they got it to be something more than perfect.

The conclusion is bittersweet, honest and telling.  There isn’t a happy ending that wraps it up neatly because the story has revealed that the world of the story is complex, hard and uncompromising – through either stiff social morals or endemic corruption.

I’m deeply sad that this film wasn’t more successful, firstly because it deserved to be, it’s truly magnificent. Secondly I’m sad because it meant that we didn’t get any more Easy Rawlins book-to-film adaptations.  If you haven’t seen it, do so soon, it was one of the best films of the 1990s in my view.

 

Favourite supporting actor: Lisa Nicole Carson is great is Coretta but as mentioned above Don Cheadle steals the film.

 

Favourite scene: The drunk scene where Mouse is drawing on Easy (with two guns) so drunk he can’t remember why, or even who Easy is – it’s how Easy talks him down that makes the scene.

 

Favourite line:

Mouse: You said don’t shoot him, right? Well I didn’t; I choked him… If you didn’t want me to kill him, why did you leave me alone with him?

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Film 5: Double Indemnity

The next film watched was Double Indemnity a Film Noir classic from 1944.

Directed by Billy Wilder, it had impeccable crime writing credentials; co-written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, adapted from a James M Cain story.  It was also based on a famous true life murder from the 1920s, which itself inspired other films such as The Postman Always Rings Twice (which incredibly I have never seen either version of but would like to) and Body Heat which I would like to watch again too at some point.

The story follows the involvement of insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) with femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). Neff becomes infatuated with Dietrichson, and he agrees to kill her husband in order for her to claim on his life insurance.  The film later reveals this might not be the first husband she has had killed.

The double indemnity of the title is the fact that if her husband dies of an apparent accident on a train, the insurance will pay out double to Dietrichson.

The story is further complicated by the suspicions of Barton Keyes (Edward G Robinson), who is an investigating agent from the same insurance company as Neff (the two are friends).  Keyes’ suspicions that the accident has more about it than it seems, combined with those of Dietrichson’s stepdaughter Lola, lead in to a tangled spiral of deception and treachery.

The story is narrated in flashback by Neff in the office of Keyes, reciting the entire tale in to an early Dictaphone type machine.   The narration is one of the stylistic features of the genre and so over-parodied by now that it took me a little while to relax in the method of storytelling – at first I always keep expecting a joke.

Narration is hard to do well in film, I think perhaps because it has been so overdone as a storytelling device, possibly because it’s actually quite an easy way of telling a story.  Some film narrations can be incredibly powerful though, Martin Sheen’s narrative in Apocalypse Now and that of Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption are part of what makes them both truly great and memorable films.  Contrast that with the first theatrical cut of Blade Runner which had a narration added.  Harrison Ford is alleged to have said that he made the narration in Blade Runner as toneless and lifeless as possible in the hope they wouldn’t use it (no idea if that is true).  I don’t actually think it’s as awful as some say, but then I like all the versions of the film that I have seen (there is a rather good DVD boxset which includes all known versions).

Other than narration, another Film Noir genre trope in Double Indemnity is the way that the leading man is at first a gullible fool when infatuated and the fact that the leading woman is portrayed as deeply blackhearted.  In this film and others the blame for wrong actions is more clearly attached to the woman, even though in this case it is the man that carries it out – in fact it’s Neff that initially plots the murder, inferring it as Dietrichson’s wish.  In The Maltese Falcon, Niles Archer (Bogart’s detective partner) gets killed because he is too trusting of a woman, conversely Bogart later escapes arrest and possible murder by being cynical and untrusting (and also by not being as apparently corrupt as he at first seems).

Double Indemnity is a great film, one that Wilder was apparently truly and justly very proud of.

Favourite scene:  The final scene with Neff and Dietrichson, to describe it would be a spoiler, as would describing the actual final scene of the film which is another great one.

Favourite supporting performance: Edward G Robinson without a doubt, I love his tenacity in hunting down the fraudsters, not for the insurance company but for the thrill of the chase and the battle of logic.  He’s not a pretty man and in Hollywood today I wonder if such an actor would get roles as big as he did in his day – personally I love his face and it has such character.  Mind you I think Ron Perlman is the most beautiful ugly man in Hollywood, so what do I know?

Bullet Deadliness Quotient: Very high.  If you get shot in Film Noir, you’re going down. Even being hit in the shoulder might not save you…

Favourite lines:

Phyllis: “I was just fixing some ice tea; would you like a glass? ”
Neff: “Yeah, unless you got a bottle of beer that’s not working.”

Neff: “Suddenly it came over me that everything would go wrong. It sounds crazy, Keyes, but it’s true, so help me. I couldn’t hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man.”

Neff: “Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money – and a woman – and I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pretty, isn’t it?”

Neff: “Why didn’t you shoot again, baby? Don’t tell me it’s because you’ve been in love with me all this time?”

Phyllis: “No, I never loved you, Walter, not you or anybody else. I’m rotten to the heart. I used you just as you said. That’s all you ever meant to me. Until a minute ago, when I couldn’t fire that second shot. I never thought that could happen to me.”

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