Devil in a Blue Dress

 

Director Carl Franklin

Franklin on the set with Denzel Washington

Novelist Walter Mosley

DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS                         A-                                                                         USA  (102 mi)  1995  d: Carl Franklin

It was summer 1948, and I needed money.  After goin’ door-to-door all day long, I was back again at Joppy’s bar trying to figure out where I was gonna go looking for work the next day.  The newspapers was goin’ on and on about the city elections – like they was really gonna change somebody’s life.  But my life had already changed when I lost my job three weeks before.         —Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins (Denzel Washington)

Recalling the Raymond Chandler film noir style of criminal murkiness surrounding Los Angeles in the works of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Howard Hawks’ THE BIG SLEEP (1946), Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), or Roman Polanski’s CHINATOWN (1974), this is an early example of Denzel Washington’s rising star power, demonstrating a commanding screen presence, bringing a sexual swagger to one of his most compelling performances, coming on the heels of GLORY (1989), MO’ BETTER BLUES (1990) and MALCOLM X (1992), but years before he’d win a Best Actor Oscar for portraying a rogue cop in a deeply corrupt LA police department in TRAINING DAY (2001).  Directed by Carl Franklin, who began his career as an actor, working in theater before moving to television and a few movie roles, enrolling in the AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles where he obtained a Master’s degree in directing, with an opportunity to direct several Roger Corman films before getting his big break with the critically acclaimed neo-noir One False Move (1992).  Adding depth and social realism to a film noir aesthetic, beautifully captured on 35 mm by Tak Fujimoto’s elegant camerawork, including a magnificent opening crane shot, the film’s opening credit sequence plays out over the backdrop of Archibald John Motley Jr’s 1949 painting of Bronzeville By Night, a depiction of a South Side Chicago street at night during the 1940’s, offering a safe haven for blacks migrating from the South, displaying vibrant lights and colors to depict a bustling black entertainment district, filled with a jazz and blues infused soundtrack and an original score written by Elmer Bernstein.  Exploding off the screen, the film is transformed into a South-Central neighborhood in Los Angeles that is equally energized in motion, setting the stage for what follows, scandal, blackmail, racial turmoil, and a mayoral race with sinister implications, with one candidate mysteriously dropping out, yet bad luck seems to follow the protagonist in a convoluted plot of murder and intrigue, turning into a self-styled detective mystery, where solving the crime himself is the only way of keeping him from being charged for multiple murders, with cops typically blaming the nearest black man as the fall guy instead of actually solving the crime.  That’s just the way it works.  Adapting a 1990 hardboiled mystery novel by Walter Mosley, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins (Denzel Washington), providing his own noir voiceover narration, is a war veteran transplanted from Houston, Texas, part of the migratory tradition of blacks from the Deep South of Texas and Louisiana heading West to Los Angeles after the Great Depression and the war in search of jobs while escaping the Jim Crow South, finding good paying work in the shipping and aircraft industries, where Easy is a machinist who has taken advantage of the GI Bill and is one of the few blacks owning his own home at the time, a product of the American Dream and a continued source of pride, as property ownership wields power (largely confined to whites), “That house meant more to me than any woman I ever knew,” yet the film opens just as he’s losing his job, putting him in a precarious position.  Mixing humor with scenes meant to unsettle and disturb, the film openly intends to challenge perceptions on race and interject a black realist sensibility, largely by advancing an intelligent narrative seen exclusively through the eyes of a strong black protagonist, taking us on an odyssey through the moral cesspool and racial fault lines of greater Los Angeles, as alienation, political corruption, and a cynical view of human nature were central to the postwar film noir aesthetic, yet with the notable exception of No Way Out (1950) or Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), noir films always ignored the rampant racism of the times, where the law shelters and protects wealthy whites, no matter how despicable their crimes.  Set primarily in the black community of Watts in 1948, the film eloquently depicts the everyday oppression and harm that comes to black Americans simply living ordinary lives in the postwar years after WWII, a marked difference from the noticeable exclusion of black characters and black communities from the classic noir films from the era that conveniently highlighted white neighborhoods.  Evading the poverty and crime-infested life in Houston’s 5th Ward, Easy moved West only to discover that the same miseries are inflicted upon blacks in Los Angeles.  Securing a job at one of the many aircraft plants, he purchased a house and settled into a working-class neighborhood, but was fired for refusing to work overtime, acknowledging that whites routinely refused, yet he was the one fired by a white boss who felt threatened by a black man standing up for himself, recalling a similar scene in Michael Roemer’s Nothing But a Man (1964), quickly discovering his mortgage is nearly two months overdue.  While sitting in his local bar reading the classified ads in the newspaper, the bartender Joppy (Mel Winkler), an ex-boxer also from Houston, invites him over to meet a friend, DeWitt Albright (Tom Sizemore), who turns out to be a sleazy white businessman who does “favors for friends,” handing out $100 just to find someone, a missing white woman known for frequenting black establishments, apparently hiding out in the black juke joints along LA’s Central Avenue.  Against his better judgment he accepts the job, acknowledging “It was easy money, too easy,” but he’s in no position to find a better offer.  

It was the success of Franklin’s earlier film One False Move (1992) that paved the way for someone like Jonathan Demme to help produce the film, having worked with actor Denzel Washington in his acclaimed yet heavily criticized film PHILADELPHIA (1993), the last movie where Washington did not have a starring role.  Following in the footsteps of Steve McQueen’s Bullitt (1968), Paul Newman’s HARPER (1966) and THE DROWNING POOL (1975), the Coen brother’s Blood Simple (1984), William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA (1985), or Michael Mann’s Thief (1981) and HEAT (1995), this film subversively navigates a predominantly black milieu in search of a missing white woman, with Easy finding himself contending with crooked cops, sleazy politicians, and an increasing number of dead bodies that he will be accused of murdering, yet the film surprisingly failed at the box office despite critical acclaim, perhaps a fallout from the nonstop, yearlong media coverage sensationalizing every minute detail of the O.J. Simpson trial (2016 Top Ten List #4 O.J.: Made in America), leaving viewers oversaturated with bombshell racial implications and needing a break, where it didn’t help that the film opened the same week as the verdict, also contending against the massive popularity of David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), and eventually overlooked by the overwhelming success of L.A. Confidential (1997), an all-white perspective and one of the “whitest” films ever made, which in 2008 was voted the best film set in Los Angeles in the last 25 years by a group of Los Angeles Times writers and editors (L.A.'s story is complicated, but they got it - Los Angeles Times).  A complex and otherwise engrossing story that is fabulously entertaining while also a social critique, this movie might have been franchised, with Franklin acquiring the rights to the first three Mosley-written installments, proposing a series of films, but it never happened, though novelist Walter Mosley, reportedly President Bill Clinton’s favorite novelist, wrote 15 popular crime fiction novels based upon the Easy Rawlins’ character, earning him the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2020, making him the first black man to receive the honor.  What immediately stands out is that Easy makes an enormous effort to avoid breaking the law, priding himself in living a respectable and morally principled life, easily interacting with his neighbors, conveying a sense of community, where it’s clear he hasn’t yet become a detective, but is just a guy who’s constantly pulled into a criminal underworld, drowning in a subterranean network of dishonesty and moral hypocrisy, caught up in a white power struggle that has a way of eliminating marginalized figures, lured into unjust fates, which only reflects their lowly position in society, as the black community has felt powerless for generations, deprived of basic human rights, which is only exacerbated in the film noir genre, living like shadows, unseen by the majority white population where they literally don’t exist.  Blacks hoped to find a sense of empowerment by serving in the armed forces in WWII, but returning home, no matter how hard they worked, they still ended up at the bottom.  In postwar film noir, there are distinct color lines, as Los Angeles is divided into forbidden zones for blacks, where venturing into those areas, especially after dark, they run the risk of being physically attacked by racist whites or being singled out by the police as potential thieves or burglars, where racism and abuse of power are cut from the same cloth.  The film delves into different facets of white oppression, blatantly exhibiting a fear of miscegenation, with the absurdity of anti-miscegenation laws, where it’s easy to link whiteness to black deaths, exuded in the contaminated characters of his white employer at Champion Aircraft, expecting blacks to be completely subservient, obeying each and every employer request, Albright, a ruthless white gangster who does the bidding of more powerfully connected whites, routinely resorting to unethical practices and cold-blooded violence, the threateningly corrupt white LAPD homicide detectives (Beau Starr and John Roselius), whose whiteness is sanctified by the law yet they routinely commit the most flagrant acts of violence against blacks, or plant evidence against innocent victims, with blacks demonstrating a futile yet all-consuming helplessness in the 40’s and 50’s, having no legal recourse against unending atrocities, Todd Carter (Terry Kinney), a wealthy and well-connected white businessman and mayoral candidate who throws his money around to ensure his white privileged status in the community is protected (ironic that the character most associated with cowardice would attain the highest political power), and even casual encounters with racist white youths, who see Easy as a threat to white womanhood, defined as the exclusive domain of white men, viewed as their own personal possession.  It’s the film noir narration that offers insight into Easy’s viewpoint as a black man, worldly in ways viewers are not accustomed to, as blacks are routinely targeted for crimes white people commit, not shocking or earth-shaking, common knowledge in black communities, where social justice is equated with moral outrage and contempt, meaning something entirely different than anything perceived by whites, having never experienced the uniquely different historical perspective of American blacks.

Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals) is the entitled femme fatale character who sets the entire narrative in motion, the object of Easy’s search, fiancé of the mayoral candidate Todd Carter, yet also runs with Frank Green (Joseph Latimore), a black hoodlum with a fondness for a blade, quickly caught up in a disastrous web of lies and crime, as he’s easily hoodwinked into believing he’d found her, thrown off by the sultry sexuality of Coretta James (Lisa Nicole Carson), the girlfriend of Dupree Brouchard (Jernard Burks), both old friends from Houston.  As a friend of Daphne, she withholds information, deflecting the truth, instead luring Easy into a steamy sexual encounter while Dupree is drunkenly passed out in the next room.  Albright arranges for a meeting with Easy at the Malibu Pier, an exclusive white neighborhood where he’s accosted by racist youths for talking to a white girl, but Albright comes to his defense, pulling a gun on one of the kids and scaring him senseless, yet by the time he arrives back home the next morning, he’s greeted by a team of white detectives who savagely beat him during an extensive interrogation, where Easy knows they’re not after the truth, just someone to convict, claiming he’s the last one seen with Coretta before she was brutally murdered, but no charges are filed.  Immediately afterwards, he’s ordered inside a car of Matthew Terell (Maury Chaykin), another mayoral candidate, understandably hesitant, but his driver insists, “If he wanted to hurt you, he would have done so already.”  This certainly sets an underlying mood of deeply agitated tension in the air, fertile grounds for Daphne to finally contact Easy, meeting at the Ambassador Hotel, having a bellboy escort him up a side entrance, as blacks are not allowed on the premises, growing more worried about being in a white neighborhood after dark in the company of a white woman when she asks him to drive her to Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills to meet Richard McGee (Scott Lincoln), a white man seen earlier at the club who’s apparently in possession of a very important letter, but they discover he’s been brutally murdered, with his house ransacked.  Daphne panics and takes off, leaving Easy behind, finding his way home by the next morning when Albright is waiting for him, pulling a knife, none too pleased that the information passed along turned out to be bogus, but having seen Daphne gives Easy one more chance to get it right.  Feeling threatened, as people keep breaking into his home, he sends for a friend back in Houston before confronting Joppy about his so-called friend who nearly took his head off, getting him involved in an underworld of unscrupulous criminality, the exact kind of people Easy had been working so hard to avoid in his new life in Los Angeles.  He heads into the luxurious, upscale neighborhood of Todd Carter, learning that Albright was actually hired by Terell, while Carter thought Daphne was miles away (paid by his family to leave town), delighted to hear she was nearby, offering him money to find her, yet when he gets home, he’s jumped by Frank Green, pulling a knife and quickly getting him to the ground and is about to slit his throat when Mouse (Don Cheadle) intervenes, his trigger-happy friend from Houston, a career criminal with homicidal tendencies, shooting Green in the shoulder while trying to get him to talk, allowing Frank to escape, “You only been in my house five minutes, and you already done shot someone.”  Mouse is the kind of friend who shoots first and asks questions later, and can be hilariously menacing, stealing nearly every scene he’s in, always one step over the edge while wearing a particularly dapper style of suit.  Easy is morally upright and thinks things through, while Mouse quickly resorts to violence, like a defense mechanism, yet clearly he’s there to help Easy, which he appreciates, but he’ll also screw things up in a heartbeat, leaving Easy responding in horror, which plays out in due course.  Questioned again by detectives who are ready to arrest him for murder, he pleads for one more day to actually find the killer, leading to a whirlwind finale that takes us through a twisted and circuitous path, discovering hidden truths about several of the major players, turning into murky, atmospheric revelations in the style of CHINATOWN, exposing a seedy underbelly where Los Angeles is viewed as a breeding ground for sin and moral depravity, viewed fatalistically through a noir lens, with little hope for change.  Straightjacketed by the race issue, black expression is suffocated and stifled, confined to their limited space, while political payoffs allow much bigger crimes to flourish, poisoning the waters of the future.  Franklin does an excellent job recreating images of the 40’s and 50’s, using racial dividing lines as a litmus test for moral transgressions, where Easy can’t rely upon any white authoritative control, but must set his own standards for principled justice, serving as his own moral compass.  One attribute of Easy is that he has untrustworthy friends, like Coretta supplying him with bad information, or Joppy setting him up in business with dangerous company, or Mouse’s sheer sociopathic instability, despite being one of his most trustworthy friends, yet at the end of the film, sitting with a friend on the porch in front of his home, he ponders, “If you got a friend that you know does bad things, I mean real bad things, and you still keep him as a friend even though you know what he’s like, do you think that’s wrong?”  The unequivocal reply is “All you got is your friends.”  

Carl Franklin Interview with Eddie Muller - Pt 1 - YouTube (8:57)  Recorded onstage at the Music Box Theater during the 2018 Noir City Film Festival in Chicago, August 17, 2018

Carl Franklin Interview with Eddie Muller - Pt 2 YouTube (13:58)

Carl Franklin Interview with Eddie Muller - Pt 3  YouTube (12:29)

Caged Heat

 

CAGED HEAT                      D                                                                                                        USA  (83 mi)  1974  d:  Jonathan Demme

White-hot desires melting cold prison steel!                                                                        —promotional movie poster

Among a grouping of the most unbelievably bad movies ever seen, no getting around it, something of a cartoonish mess, despite the accolades this film received and its attempt to subvert the genre, removing all aspects of eroticism, considered one of the early American films that actually created a genre for this kind of thing, where the 70’s were filled with Women in prison film, aka Sluts-in-the-Slammer or Chicks-in-Chains movies, where you can expect to find cheap, low-budget, B-movie exploitation values worthy of the grindhouse market and drive-ins, where naked female flesh is the driving force, where you’ll find plenty of naked lesbians in prison, often resorting to cat fights, with inevitable shower scenes and typically sadistic prison guards or wardens punishing them for the most trivial of offenses, where rape or even gang rape is considered entertainment in this genre (though thankfully missing here), along with other naked work detail rituals, including a mandatory strip search upon entry into the prison.  Voyeur films prey upon than the criminal population of women, often racially mixed, already identified as bad girls or outsiders, so at least in men’s eyes they make easy targets to objectify and demean.  What distinguished this particular film was the loosening of the 1930’s Hays Code censorship laws in place since 1934, suddenly dropped in 1968 where no subject was taboo, allowing filmmakers to take liberties with more extreme graphic detail, often expressed through fantasy sequences, and the fact that the director went on to win a Best Director Academy Award for THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), which is a variation on the prison movie, delving into the crudely disturbing aspects of psychological horror.  The primary driving force here is a misogynistic market for leering male eyes, driven by sadistic naked sex fantasies that include a humiliating degradation of women, including plenty of physical abuse, so pornographic women in prison may include Nazi-style guards implementing their own brand of terror.  Whether or not this works for you is highly subjective, but it seems to represent the epitome of bad taste, violating every moral instinct of the viewer.  Enter Roger Corman, independent American director/producer and the schlockmeister king of exploitation sleaze, who was himself awarded an Honorary Academy Award in 2009 for his lifetime achievement, introducing young filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Monte Hellman, Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, and Ron Howard, all working with miniscule budgets, instilling in each of them the need to stay on schedule and on budget, as otherwise they’d be replaced.  Demme studied Veterinary Medicine at college while writing movie reviews for the school newspaper, developing a background in publicity, commercial production, and some film writing, where Corman gave him the opportunity to write a biker picture, co-writing and producing ANGELS HARD AS THEY COME (1971) before being given the opportunity to direct three films for Corman, the first of which was CAGED HEAT, shot by Tak Fujimoto, distinguished more than anything else by a bluesy musical score written by ex-Velvet Underground member John Cale, much of it percussive, played during extended sequences, while featuring the guitar playing of Mike Bloomfield.   

While all of those standard elements are contained within this film, released during the height of the Watergate era, with a prominent photo of disgraced President Richard Nixon hanging next to the American flag on the prison warden’s wall, it wouldn’t be a product of the times if there weren’t rebellion issues, where women get fed up with their mistreatment, fighting back against the largely patriarchal male systems of brutal domination, which some may view as feminist, but that’s a stretch, though true to the Corman format, adding social commentary was a key ingredient, where in recent years over-the-top stars like Pam Grier and Linda Blair played upon their iconic movie star status to produce female dominated RAMBO-style films, seen fighting against the corrupt forces of oppression, suggesting female empowerment, yet they typically are still leered at and exploited onscreen, exactly as the genre requires.  In that vein, Demme’s film is viewed as pro-feminist, and multi-cultural to boot, as, unlike male prison films, race is not really an issue with female prison inmates, aligning forces against entrenched bureaucratic evil is more their style, with women joining forces to kick major butt, actually achieving their goal of breaking out to freedom, even if the cheesy production values leave something to be desired, shot at the Lincoln Heights jail near downtown Los Angeles which had been closed for several years, made on a shoestring budget of $180,000.  Of course, who should star in the show, none other than topless Hollywood dancer Erica Gavin as Jackie, star of Russ Meyer’s VIXEN! (1968), seen getting arrested in a bullets and blood-riddled opening drug deal gone wrong and sent to the slammer, run by horror “scream queen” Barbara Steele as McQueen, a sex-deprived wheelchair-bound warden who believes sex is the driving force behind female criminality, hiring all-black matrons in uniforms as prison guards, allowing inmates to strut around wearing skivvies, hot pants and revealing halter tops.  Jackie’s cell mate is B-movie darling Lavelle (former Penthouse Pet of the Month, Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith), introduced in an opening dream sequence being felt up behind bars by a mysterious stranger that she quickly assaults with a gigantic knife (perhaps a reference to the crime that landed her in the slammer), while other prominent inmates include Pandora (Ella Reid), a tough-talking black chick, her loyal friend and lesbian cell mate Belle (Roberta Collins, appearing in several of Corman’s Women in Prison films), and all-around bad-ass, renegade prison enforcer Maggie (Juanita Brown), appearing with Blaxploitation superstar Pam Grier in Foxy Brown (1974) released a month earlier.  When Belle and Pandora go showbiz, performing a bawdy, full drag burlesque review in front of the warden and all the howling inmates that is X-rated, filled with lewd sex jokes, so it’s shut down prematurely, as the warden finds the material offensive, though back in her room, McQueen has a curious dream where she plays a sexy, Dietrich-like cabaret performer, revealing her sexually repressed inner diva.  Nonetheless, Pandora is reprimanded and sent to solitary confinement, served naked, of course.  In solidarity, Belle cleverly sneaks through the ventilation ducts bringing her food stored by the kitchen staff, while Jackie and Maggie get into a catfight on the shower floor, severely punished by “CPT,” or corrective physical therapy, where a demented prison doctor (Warren Miller) administers heavy doses of electric shock treatment shown in extended close-ups.  Can you believe this was released on a DVD by Disney? (Caged Heat : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video, although 4-minutes have been inexplicably cut)

While there are several obligatory shower scenes, which are just an excuse to parade naked female bodies in front of salivating male viewers, the oppressive atmosphere of sadism and mindless cruelty runs deep through this picture, eliminating any enjoyment factor, despite occasional quirky moments, where they are transported to outdoor work detail described as “Agricultural Therapy,” with no one breaking a sweat, but outside the prison, all the guards are buffoonish redneck stereotypes, dumb as rocks, getting sidetracked by leering at the girls, where a diversion allows Jackie and Maggie to escape, once arch enemies, now friends and collaborators in freedom, taking refuge in the Academy of Sexual Satisfaction, a brothel where men can get down and dirty and wrestle with the scantily clad girls, with promises of much, much more, where they meet Maggie’s sister-in-crime, the extroverted Crazy Alice, Crystin Sinclaire making her debut, showing a fierce independent streak and a sassy sex appeal.  She’s all-in on Jackie’s plan to break back into the prison to liberate their cohorts, even convincing the stubbornly disinterested Maggie, but they make a stop along the way, among the few original moments of the film, where they rob a bank only to discover incredulously that it’s already being robbed.  Scored to jug band music, with the women dressed to the nines, resembling that trendsetting, fashion conscious bank robber Patty Hearst, wearing that infamous Bonnie Parker beret, they find the money easy pickings, with the original robbers pursued by police, allowing them a clean getaway.  The dramatic emphasis however is reserved for Belle, caught smuggling food for her friend, surprising one of the kitchen matrons who drops dead on the spot from the shock, immediately blamed for her murder.  McQueen has a special treatment plan lying in wait, a prison lobotomy performed with a Black and Decker power drill in the psycho-surgery ward.  That should cure her aggressiveness.  But the doctor does creepy things with her first, staging naked Polaroid photos of an unconscious prisoner, fondling her, while kissing her endlessly.  Can our girls get there in time?  All of which leads to a big shoot out spectacle at the end, where, treading new ground, and in stark contrast to the nihilist ending of Jules Dassin’s prison movie Brute Force (1947), for instance, this suggests an open revolt, where sisterhood is powerful, as there are no inmate casualties, only the prison staff get killed (shot by their own guards), creating an illusory picture of liberation.  While heavy doses of nudity may have been a cultural revelation, a loosening of moral restrictions, but the cavalier degradation of women is such an overriding dynamic in a genre associating nudity with female abuse, one can’t help wondering why these revolting films were even being made in the first place.  Just who exactly found them entertaining?  Don’t they normalize a sociopathic mistreatment of women with sadistic cruelty, instigating more harm than good?  The large majority of the population never crossed paths with movies like this, so its influence was negligible, only appealing to lovers of high camp and degenerate trash, where this all may look entirely different under the influence of drugs, where dreadfully bad films can become a laugh riot, much like the underground popularity for the ILSA, SHE WOLF OF THE SS (1975) series starring Dyanne Thorne as a Nazi prison Kommandant, a European counterpart released the following year, with Chicago film critic Gene Siskel describing it as “the most degenerate picture I have seen to play downtown.”  These films call attention to the barbaric medical experiments performed on prisoners, targeting the most vulnerable and economically disadvantaged, implemented by the most abusively evil and deranged authority, but these are among the earliest films specializing in sadistic torture porn, which are all the rage right now, invading the mainstream, shown at the local Cineplex, even on television, now given high-end, sophisticated production values.