12 Comments

Oh man do I ever love this movie. So weird that Ebert was cool on this one, which I think is better than One False Move in pretty much every way.

Weirdly enough, I remember Peter Travers from Rolling Stone LOVING this movie and leading off their review section with it and here's a quote I just found online - "Devil in a Blue Dress is the whip-smart and sexy film version of Walter Mosley’s acclaimed 1990 debut novel. Set in Los Angeles in 1948, Devil puts a spin on Chinatown to provide a black perspective on the layers of corruption that stretch from the streets to the corridors of power. Denzel Washington is flat-out perfection as Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a private detective almost by accident." Granted, Travers likes a LOT of stuff, he ain't picky, but, in the review he goes on at length on how great this movie is, more than usual even for him.

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I still haven't lost hope for a belated sequel, even if it's not a film. Franklin has been out of the feature game for a while, but he's found a niche in noir-ish television and Mosley's series seems tailor-made for the modern streaming landscape. You have to think there's a pitch sitting on somebody's desk, right? The bigger question might be, would Denzel make the jump to the small screen?

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Jul 26, 2022Liked by Keith Phipps

Regal just made a Facebook post asking what movie deserves a sequel that doesn't have one, so I made sure to drop a link to you guys and call out Devil in a Blue Dress, which is almost always my answer to that question anyways.

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Rented this movie when it came out on VHS, assuming (given that Denzel starred in it and yet I'd barely heard of it) that it would be not so great. What a find it turned out to be! In addition to the many pleasures Keith noted, the jazz/blues soundtrack fits right in the movie's pocket and was in heavy rotation in my household for months afterward.

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Carl Franklin should have gotten more opportunities. One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress are two perfect films. Out of Time is pretty good too.

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Gosh damn One False Move was good. This is good too.

I'm getting on my horse a bit here but this is adjacent to why so many Black writers struggle to publish as well. Walter Mosley is a titan in the publishing industry; a multi-hyphenate whose Easy Rawlins series is his best known work. And yet, when I started going through it 7-8 years ago, I had to get a lot of his books secondhand because many of the later Rawlins books are out of print. Contrast this with, say, Michael Connelly and James Patterson, both of whom dominate shelf-after-shelf in your local big box bookseller. You can get just about any Harry Bosch book you want instantly.

In other words, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books a Million, etc. could do more to make Black writers (and Brown, and Indigenous, and AAPI, etc.) succeed besides just having "diversity" sales tables.

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