Black and white Americans live in parallel universes. Blacks are forced by circumstances to venture out into the white universe because it is the larger one, but many whites are unaware, except in the vaguest sense, of the existence or nature of the black universe. Two recent verdicts in Los Angeles demonstrate this clearly: In the videotaped beating of Rodney King, a mostly white jury saw police officers threatened by a deranged black man. In the Simpson trial, a mostly black jury was unimpressed by the white prosecutor's mountain of tainted evidence.

"Devil in a Blue Dress," based on Walter Mosely's l990 debut novel, shows us Los Angeles half a century before these two watershed events. It is not yet the city of crack cocaine and drive-by shootings, but the City of Angels is already a land of broken promises and dreams deferred.

In Carl Franklin's finely tuned second film, we meet Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins in the Los Angeles of l948. Like so many blacks who served in World War II, Easy Rawlins has come home restless, and hungry for a piece of the American Dream he fought for. Hoeing rows and chopping cotton isn't enough for him now. The mystique of the white man has been broken. In Europe, he killed white boys who looked a lot like his Texas field bosses, so he heads west to work in the booming factories of Los Angeles. California promises him a little breathing room and the chance to live in a slightly less repressive society.

As the opening credits roll, the camera moves languidly across a moody canvas depicting night life in "Colored Town." The painting dissolves into a Los Angeles street scene so real that it could pass for archival footage. The cars, the clothes, even the baby carriages evoke the bustling prosperity and unbridled dreams of postwar America. As the camera closes in on a barroom where Easy Rawlins is scouring the want ads for a job, it is almost jolting to encounter the recognizable face of Denzel Washington.

Easy has just lost his job at an aircraft plant. Exhausted and sick from one overtime shift after another, he refuses to work another late night. The boss delivers a condescending lecture about having to work hard if you want to get ahead, and fires him. "He wouldn't have fired a white man for that," Easy observes sardonically. Now Easy is in a tough spot. He owns a tiny house, a twenties-era bungalow so cramped he can hardly turn around in it. But it's his, the most valuable thing he has ever called his own, and he is not about to forfeit it to the bank.

Into the bar walks an opportunity--and trouble. An old friend introduces Easy to a slick white gangster by the name of DeWitt Albright, who needs to find a woman for a "friend." The job pays cash up front, which is just what Easy needs to save his house. "I'd look for her myself," Albright explains, "But she has a predilection for the company of Negroes. She likes jazz and pigs' feet and dark meat, if you know what I mean."

Easy knows what Albright means, and he knows he's getting into something dangerous. But he also knows that he needs to make the payments on his house. Easy's house represents an imagined future. When he goes home he gets a feeling of happiness that he has never known before. He likes seeing the neatly mowed lawns, the kids playing in the streets, the men washing their cars under the palm trees. It is a modest neighborhood, peopled by modest folk with modest dreams, and it is a far cry from the miserable shacks of Texas field hands.

Easy agrees to search for Daphne Monet, even though his gut tells him not to. He wants to believe that no harm will come to her if he finds her. He has to believe it, but he can't. And he loathes stooping for money from one white man just after another has fired him.

Franklin begins by sticking close to Walter Mosley's novel, but toward the end, he veers from the original and strips the enigmatic Daphne Monet of her chilling amorality. For that reason, it is best to read the book after seeing the film. Mosley's novel is a page-turner, brimming with irony and insight far surpassing what you will find in most detective fiction. Mosley serves up a wealth of rich psychological detail as he builds Easy's motivation--and much of this is cut from the film. In one particularly powerful passage in the novel, Easy goes, against his better judgment, to see Albright about the job. A white doorman stops him as he enters the building.

"Excuse me."

The voice made me jump.

"What?" My voice strained and cracked as I turned to see the small man.

"Who are you looking for?"

He was a little white man wearing a suit that was also a uniform.

"I'm looking for, um … ah … ,"

I stuttered. I forgot the name. I had to squint so that the room wouldn't start spinning.

It was a habit I developed in Texas when I was a boy. Sometimes, when a white man of authority would catch me off guard, I'd empty my head of everything so I was unable to say anything. "The less you know, the less trouble you find," they used to say. I hated myself for it but I also hated white people, and colored people too for making me that way.

After Easy regains his composure and produces Albright's business card, the little white man begins grilling him, forcing him to explain himself over and over. Remembering the war in Europe Easy thinks to himself, "I would have liked to rip the skin from his face like I'd done once to another white boy."

Trimming scenes like this can eviscerate a novel, but Franklin knows how to tell a story visually. "Devil in a Blue Dress" does not preach, nor does it stack the deck with good black folks and nasty white ones. It simply tells the story from within the black universe rather than the white one. Instead of peeking into the black universe as most American films touching on black life do, it looks outward from it, into the bewildering and dangerous white world. When two white detectives administer a station-house beating that could have come straight from the diaries of Mark Furman, we experience it from the perspective of Easy Rawlins, who knows that he may never leave the interrogation room alive. When he is finally released, he is followed by two idly mocking white cops in a patrol car. "The game of cops and niggers continued even after I was released," Easy observes, "But I didn't pay it no mind."

Franklin's sharp eye for the realities of race in America was apparent in his first film, "One False Move." On the surface, it's a standard drug-deal-gone-bad plot, but under Franklin's direction, it achieves much more. The cops are black and white, as are the drug dealers. Two L.A. detectives travel to a small town in Arkansas in search of the murderers and join forces with a young redneck sheriff. The sheriff sometimes refers to the two black criminals as niggers, in the presence of the middle-aged black cop (he calls the other criminal a piece of white trash).

Yet the black cop relates to him more easily than the white cop does. An ex-southerner himself, the black cop understands the two parallel universes and has made an uneasy peace with them. The redneck is blissfully ignorant. Halfway through the film festival screening of "One False Move," a particular scene made me realize, "This movie was made by a black director. A white director couldn't have evoked these characters so truthfully." My hunch was confirmed when Carl Franklin stepped out onto the stage for a Q and A session after the screening.

Franklin is an intense yet unassuming man whose films operate on many levels. Like "One False Move," "Devil in a Blue Dress" can be appreciated simply as a tightly constructed detective movie. But it is much more than that. Franklin shows us that the worlds of black and white America are far more divided than most whites want to acknowledge.

American schools are still, to a large extent, segregated by race. So are many of our neighborhoods and, to our enduring shame, our churches. The parallel universes barely touch when God is being worshiped. The gospel continues to be studied and preached to two homogeneous flocks that rarely speak to one another.

Until white people can acknowledge the existence of the parallel universes, they will be unable to understand the depth of alienation felt by so many blacks. "Devil in a Blue Dress" is a tough, uncompromising film that allows seekers to learn something profound about life in America.

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

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