Saw DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (Carl Franklin, 1995), on my big screen in a gorgeous blu-ray last night and it was like seeing it for the first time. The opening credits appear over an Archibald Motley panting, ‘Bronzeville by Night’, of black people at night moving through a busy street in the city, all blues and blacks with splashes of red. T-Bone Walker’s ‘West Side Baby’ is on the soundtrack. It’s late 40’s Los Angeles but a different world, rich in relationships, sexy but also dangerous.

The dangers in this world mainly come from the outside. Here, alongside the usual corruption at City Hall, motifs typical of the genre, we also see the entrenched racism, the glee and brutality with which white supremacists enact that racism. My theory is that this aspect of the film is what made it a flop upon first release. All the white characters are either enthusiastic supremacists, have inhabited the racism to such an extent it’s exercised casually and unconsciously, or are aware but bow down to the ‘practicalities,’ such as what the effects of the ‘one drop rule’ might have on a political career in that time. I doubt a mainstream American audience, which is mainly white, likes to see itself so.

I find it one of the greatest noirs of the nineties, still undervalued. I remember when I read Walter Mosley’s novels, thinking its central conceit was so clever it brought new dimensions to the genre. How does a black detective solve crime during Jim Crowe when the institutions, entire parts of the city, even hotels and restaurants are no-go areas for black people? Here Denzel Washington is ‘Easy’ Rawlins, out of the army, out of a job because he didn’t kow tow enthusiastically enough to his white bosses at the aircraft company, and with a mortgage to pay. A gangster friend of a friend (Tom Sizemore) pays him handsomely to find a woman – Daphne (Jennifer Beals), the ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’, and before he knows it, he’s caught in a web of sleaze and murder and necessity and smarts make an unwilling detective out of him.

The film’s world is a black suburban, poor but neighbourly, a downtown area with black businesses; the rest of the city, dangerous with white people; a cabin in the woods, even more dangerous because only white people. Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography is gorgeous. This world black people live in is poor, but sensuous and beautiful, with a particular type of colour — blue, amber, burnt orange — and few cinematographers have filmed black skin better in this period: Denzel Washington’s looks like cinnamon velvet.

My other theory as to why this noir doesn’t quite get its due within noir fandom is that it has a ‘happy ending’. At the end of the film, we return to the black suburban community, with its local characters, its community, kids on bikes, church-going. The kiddie fiddlers, corruption, police brutality and racism are elements that impinge on this community, that it can’t at this stage overcome, but that it survives through the adoption of other, better values. Though many noirs end with the illusion of a ‘happy end’ this type of love for a place and a people is unusual, generically discordant but absolutely necessary in relation the film’s themes and intentions. Atypical of noir is also the humour that erupts, particularly through the casual killings of Mouse – a great performance by Don Cheadle.

Jennifer Beals’ performance is still a problem, she’s too awkward and ill at ease. But it’s about the only false note. As Shelley Wiinters said of Burt Lancaster, just watching Denzel Washington walk in this movie is its own sensual pleasure; and this in a film where the colour alone has its own erotics. A thrill to see in such a beautiful blu-ray from Indicator.

José Arroyo