Devil in a blue dress

In this neo-noir thriller Denzel Washington plays Easy Rawlins, an ex-service man with a shady past, residing in California, who reluctantly agrees to locate the missing girlfriend of a local politician. As the inexpert detective trawls the town looking for Daphne, he spends the night with a black girl who shortly after turns up dead. Rawlins becomes embroiled in trouble whilst trying to avoid a murder charge and locate the elusive Daphne. Faithful recreation of the 1940s setting generates an alluring atmosphere for a typical detective mystery that pays homage to the classic hardboiled detective thrillers of yore and has all the typical hallmarks of the genre: a dogged private eye, voice over narration, shady, omnivorously sexual women, duplicitous clients, brutal cops, and a deep, dark secret at the heart of it all. But “Devil in a blue dress” differentiates itself from standard noir with a tense depiction of racism cultivated by cops, hoods and local folks alike, that permeates the film. Rawlins’s local suburb, a cornucopia of Negro families living happily amidst middle class domesticity, contrasts with the seedy, murky violence of a bloody drug war. Adapted from the novel by African-American crime author Walter Mosley.