Devil in a Blue Dress.

When Denzel Washington, playing the neophyte detective Easy Rawlins, gets punched on the side of the head by a racist cop during an interrogation, he does something no movie private eye, white or black, has ever done. He yelps. It's a cry of fear and pain and, most of all, outraged dignity. He's knocked all the way to the other side of the room, and when his attacker and another policeman close in with questions and taunts, Easy stutters his replies. But when he's struck again, the young black man fights back so fiercely that the bigot's partner, playing "good cop," has to intervene and calm down both men for the sake of continuing the investigation. That yelp, that stutter, that flurry of fists, express so much of Rawlins's character--his daunting knowledge of what white men feel free to do to blacks, the courage that persists in defiance of that knowledge, his surprisingly unquenched capacity for being outraged by the world's injustice--that, days after seeing Devil in a Blue Dress, I am still struck with admiration at the way Washington managed to show so much of Easy Rawlins in a few seconds.

This Walter Mosley creation, though the hero of an ongoing series set in that classic film noir territory, the Los Angeles of 1948 (subsequent mysteries are set in subsequent decades), isn't a typical film noir hero. Easy is no Humphrey Bogart stoic who responds to threats and batterings with sneers and wisecracks. Nor is he a Shaft with the fires of black revolution burning in his eyes. Rawlins has agreed to track down a woman for a white politician only because he's got mortgage payments to meet and has just lost his regular job. This is his first case and he knows he's in over his head, but the mortgage payments--and a streak of obstinacy--keep him on the case. Easy is no superman--his very name seems to admit it--but he's an everyman with guts.

Near the beginning of the movie, director Carl Franklin gives us more than one long shot of that perfectly ordinary little house that Easy is struggling to maintain while many of his neighbors are heading back to the South or up to the Northeast in search of work. The front of the house is photographed in a mellow, simmering light that tells us that this is Easy's safe harbor in a dangerous world. While running down leads, he will encounter several blacks who long ago gave up any ambition to own a chunk of the earth (if they ever had such a dream) and instead have burrowed into various expedient crevices, defending their turfs with whatever means necessary and striking deals with predatory whites for the sake of survival or profit. It's the (believable) conceit of this story that the black characters can serve as go-betweens, messengers, and paladins for the whites because (as one white gangster puts it) a black "takes a risk every time he walks out his front door." If your life is in danger on a daily basis, why not take a few more risks and turn a profit? Easy may or may not hold this sentiment himself, but he has a gallant nostalgia for tranquillity, security, hearth, and home. And it's the satisfying irony of Mosley's story that the "devil in a blue dress" whom he is paid to find and who seems to be a classic film noir dame, turns out to have at least one thing in common with Easy: she, too, is seeking a safe harbor.

In 1992, Carl Franklin made the best American movie of the year, One False Move (yes, it was even better than Unforgiven). A thriller about three criminals headed for a showdown with three police officers in a sleepy Southern town, it prolonged for ninety racking minutes all the dread that's packed into the last few seconds preceding a car collision. But Move also had subtleties of characterization and social observation, plus great acting and a directorial style that recalled James Agee's description of John Huston: "His style is practically invisible as well as practically universal in its possible good uses; it is the most virile movie style I know of...."

Devil in a Blue Dress is both simpler and more complicated than One False Move. The characterizations and social insights of the new film lack the complexities of Move. Yet, because Devil is a detective story, not a psychological thriller like Move, it has all sorts of complications of circumstantiality--who went where at what time with whom?--that have to be sorted out in the last twenty minutes. And so, aside from the climactic gunplay, those twenty minutes are the least gripping in the movie. I like detective stories more than Edmund Wilson did, but his attack on them in his essay, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?", contained one just complaint: after pages and pages of powerfully poetic writing in a Raymond Chandler novel, the reader is stuck with sorting out timetables and alibis at the conclusion. Cinematically transposed, that goes for Devil in a Blue Dress. Granted, Walter Mosley's story (adapted by Franklin) relates all the plotty little details to the main theme of individuals seeking their niches in a race-divided society, and that the director keeps nearly all the action lucid (Devil is coherent), still, after ninety minutes of excellent entertainment, Devil abruptly ceases to be interesting.

There is one other problem. Don Cheadle has been greatly praised for his performance as Mouse, Easy's psychopathic sidekick. The role is excitedly conceived by Mosley as the unbridled id of the hero. Easy has sublimated his rage at injustice into a pattern of behavior founded on reason and dignified compromise; Mouse is willing to kill anybody who gets in his way, yet he's always on Easy's side. Franklin has preserved the disturbing ambiguity of this friendship in his script, but Don Cheadle lacks the coiled rattlesnake quality that Mouse must have.

Still, this is one of those movies with faults that fade in the memory soon after viewing while the better moments linger. If there are more Easy Rawlins movie-s-and who can doubt it?--it will be a pleasure to spend more time in the company of Denzel Washington.