(1946) just as a few opportunities began to emerge in Hollywood: Canada Lee and James Edwards played key roles in Body and Soul (1947) and The Set-Up (1949), respectively.
Far outside the studio system and following the lead of Oscar Micheaux, Spencer Williams was knocking out low-budget noirs like Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A. Nearly wholly absent from any of those signature films, all so obsessed with the absence of color, were any black characters, except at their narratives’ periphery. John Alton’s final iconic image of The Big Combo (1955) silhouettes Susan (Jean Wallace) and Detective Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) in a fog-shrouded airplane hangar. Trenchcoats and tight lips, fedoras, handguns, you get it.
The classics of the genre that became so recognizable and imitated in the 1940s, from The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity to The Killers, Out of the Past, The Big Combo, and Laura all evidence so many of the same signature components: the down-and-out antihero, the investigative narrative fractured by flashbacks, the labyrinthine plots full of twists and turns, the voice-over narration, the femme fatale, and the evocative, signature chiaroscuro of low-lit urban street corners, shadowy interiors, and reflective surfaces, all designed to unsettle and disorient. Historically, film noir in its original incarnation was-ironically so for an idiom so drenched in darkness-comprised nearly entirely of white characters, and, by extension, white directors, producers, and writers. Franklin’s direction makes Devil in a Blue Dress both a commentary on the blinding whiteness of the film noir idiom and a treatise on an idealized, harmonious vision of a racially diverse postwar America. Investigating a disappearance that becomes a murder case in which he is also a suspect, Easy peels back the layers of a mystery that is as much about race and color as it is about the crime being solved. As Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, Washington exudes a laid-back charm that hides a wiry strength. Devil in a Blue Dress, director Carl Franklin’s stylish adaptation of Walter Mosley’s 1990 debut novel, made for a thought-provoking contribution to Denzel Washington’s rapidly growing cadre of stand-up good guys navigating a corrupt world. Overlooked in a flurry of mid-1990s neo-noirs was one intriguing experiment that but for its commercial failure might have launched an ongoing franchise.
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