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Movie Review: Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-14
SPOILER ALERT!
Devil in a Blue Dress conforms to the standard formula for a private detective story set in 1948, back when such movies flourished as film noir. Moreover, it is set in Los Angeles, a common location for such movies.
What gives this movie a decided twist is that the private detective, Easy Rawlins, is played by Denzel Washington. He and a lot of other characters in this movie are, like him, “Negroes” or “colored,” the words used in the movie, considered polite at that time. To refer to them as African Americans would sound anachronistic, so I will follow the movie’s lead in this matter.
When the movie starts, Easy is unemployed, sitting in Joppy’s bar, looking through the classified ads. Joppy introduces Easy to a white man named Dewitt Albright (Tom Sizemore), who offers Easy a chance to make some money. The job turns out to be that of trying to find a white woman named Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals). Albright says she has a “predilection for the company of Negroes.” As a result, she frequents John’s Place, a bar for colored clientele. White women are allowed in, but not white men, which is why Albright needs to hire Easy.
As with most movies of this sort, we follow Easy through a convoluted tale, learning things as he does, trying to piece it all together, with dead bodies showing up everywhere, and the police suspecting his involvement in those murders. Unfortunately, there is one thing in this movie that did not make sense to me. Were this not such an enjoyable movie to watch, I would forget about it. But since I did enjoy watching it, this apparent defect nagged me to the point that I ended up reading the novel on which it was based in hopes that doing so would clarify matters.
But let’s start with the movie and look at things from the vantage point of having seen it and now know the whole story. The backdrop for all the action is a race for mayor between two candidates, Todd Carter and Matthew Terell. Each has a secret that could become a sex scandal: the fiancée of Todd Carter is a mulatta who has been passing for white, that woman being Daphne; Terell is a pederast, whose present sex slave is a prepubescent Mexican boy, who is also Terell’s adopted son. When Albright hires Easy to find Daphne, he tells him that he is working for Carter. Later, Easy finds out that he is actually working for Terell.
When Terell finds out that Daphne is part Negro, he uses the information to force Carter to drop out of the mayor’s race. However, Daphne finds out that there are pictures of Terell having sex with children, and she figures that possession of such pictures can be used to force Terell to drop out of the race and to keep silent about her being a mulatta. The Carter family had given her $30,000 to leave town, but she figured she could use some of that money to buy the pictures. Then Carter could become mayor, and the two of them could be married.
It is this business with the pictures that is not credible. A man named Richard McGee has the pictures, which he agrees to sell to Daphne for $7,000. Adjusted for inflation that would be about $95,000 in today’s dollars. She pays him the money, but he doesn’t have the pictures on him at the moment, so he’ll have to get back with her.
Oh, sure! No one would pay that much money for pictures like that unless he or she received the pictures at the time the money was paid. In fact, Daphne gives no indication that she has seen the pictures, so she would not know for sure that they even exist.
Beyond all reason, then, she trusts Richard McGee to bring her the pictures eventually. However, after giving him all that money, she neglects to tell him where he can find her or give him a telephone number where she can be reached.
As it turns out, McGee not only intends to give Daphne the pictures, but he is desperate to do so as well. You see, the way he figures it, as long as he has the pictures in his possession, his life is in danger because Terell will be willing to have him killed to get the pictures back. But he doesn’t know where Daphne is. He tries to get into John’s Place, hoping to find her there, but he is not allowed in. So, he puts the pictures in an envelope and gives them to Junior, the bouncer at John’s Place, telling him it is a letter. He asks Junior to give the “letter” to a woman named Coretta and for her to pass it on to Daphne, since the two women are friends.
Now that he no longer has the pictures in his possession, he has nothing to worry about, right? Of course not. Albright simply assumes that McGee is holding out on him when he refuses to turn over the pictures, so he kills him and then ransacks his house looking for the pictures.
Anyway, Junior gives Coretta the “letter.” But when she looks inside the envelope and sees the pictures, she decides to sell them to Terell, letting him know she has them. But then she figures that as long as the pictures are in her possession, her life is in danger, so she puts the pictures in her Bible and gives it to Dupree, her boyfriend, to take with him before he leaves her house in the morning. Now, if I spent the night at my girlfriend’s house, and she handed me her Bible to take back home with me when I left in the morning, that would give me the creeps. But Dupree thinks nothing of it.
Anyway, now that Coretta no longer has the pictures in her possession, she has nothing to worry about, right? Of course not. Daphne says that when she found out Coretta intended to sell the pictures to Terell, she asked Joppy to scare her, but he kills her instead and then ransacks her house looking for the pictures.
So, that’s the part of this movie that did not make sense to me. After that, Easy and his friend Mouse (Don Cheadle), a psychopath, visit Dupree, who mentions the Bible that Coretta gave him, inside of which Easy finds the pictures.
By this time, Albright and a couple of his henchmen have kidnapped Daphne and taken her to an isolated house in the country. They start torturing her, thinking she has the pictures. Easy and Mouse force Joppy to lead them to that house. They kill Albright and his men, rescuing Daphne. Mouse kills Joppy too.
Once Easy gives Carter the pictures, Terell drops out of the mayor’s race. However, Carter can no longer marry Daphne for fear that the facts about her race might still come out and ruin him politically.
Mouse had gotten Daphne to give him $7,000 for the pictures, and he gives half to Easy, who decides to become a private detective for a living.
As noted above, I was so bothered by the irrational behavior of the characters in the movie who were trying either to buy or sell the pictures of Matthew Terell having sex with children that I decided to read the book to see if it made more sense. As it turned out, there are no such pictures in the novel. That means that while a lot of the people in the novel are doing the same stuff as in the movie, their motives are different; and while a lot of the people that are killed in the novel were also killed in the movie, the reasons why they were killed are different. It’s quite disorienting.
Compared to that, all other differences are minor. But here are a few. Matthew Terell is Matthew Teran in the novel. He is the one who has dropped out of the race early on because Todd Carter has information regarding his pederasty. In return, Terell/Teran tries to get information on Daphne, figuring to pressure Carter into dropping out of the race on account of her being a mulatta.
Daphne is not given $30,000 by Carter’s family. She stole it from Carter. Now, adjusted for inflation, $30,000 in 1948 is the equivalent of over $400,000 in today’s dollars. So, what are we expected to believe, that Carter had that much cash just lying around?
Albright is looking for Daphne in order to get his hands on the money she stole. So, why is Daphne still hanging around Los Angeles? If you are going to steal that much money, the first thing you should do is leave town so that no one can find you. In other words, the novel has its own problems of believability.
Going back to the movie, it is understandable why the story was changed the way it was. I mean, as long as there is a pederast running for mayor, there ought to be pictures of him having sex with children that can be used for blackmail. With that as a major plot point, the movie has an intensity that simply is not there in the novel. I just wish the story made more sense.
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