The Neo-noirs Of Denzel Washington Helped Complicate His Heroic Star Persona

Over more than 40 years in Hollywood, Denzel Washington has only ever reprised one of his characters: Robert McCall of The Equalizer trilogy. Nearly 30 years ago however, there was another potential franchise in the works for him that he, the studio, and director Carl Franklin were all eager to see work.

While only one movie of the potential series was made, it was a movie that would explore a half-century-old film genre from a riveting new perspective, showcase the talents of its star and helmer to widespread acclaim, and only see its reputation grow with the passing of time. And Washington and Franklin would team up again eight years later, to tackle the same genre again from a very different angle.

The ‘90s were a real boom time for neo-noir, with darkly stylish movies such as King Of New York, Seven, L.A. Confidential, and Heat among those that would define the decade. It was an excellent time for Franklin, an avowed fan of the genre, to be emerging as a filmmaker. The film that really set his directorial career in motion was his brilliant, brutal 1992 neo-noir One False Move. Originally slated as a direct-to-video venture, strong word of mouth from critics like Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert at festival screenings earned it a theatrical release. 

While One False Move didn’t perform well financially, further acclaim for the director put Franklin’s name on the radar of Jonathan Demme, who was producing Devil In A Blue Dress. Demme had not long finished working with Denzel Washington on Philadelphia. The team was born.

Devil In A Blue Dress, based on the cult novel of the same name by Walter Mosley, is set in 1948, in L.A. Denzel Washington plays Easy Rawlins, an out-of-work WWII veteran. Desperate to keep the house he’s worked so hard to buy, he reluctantly accepts money from the shady DeWitt Albright (Tom Sizemore) in order to find a missing white woman, Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals). The seemingly simple task soon turns complicated—complicated and deadly.  

Other than the fact it was made in 1995, and was centered around a Black protagonist and community, Devil In A Blue Dress is such a classical noir, it could practically have been released in the 1940s or ‘50s. Post-war malaise is soaked into every part of the story. Easy’s voiceover guides us through the whole tangled narrative web. There are femmes fatale and shady gangsters; political intrigue underlines it all; the action takes place in L.A. nightclubs, bars, and the sprawling abodes of the obscenely wealthy. 

Like most classic noir heroes, for a large part of the movie, Easy is completely out of his depth. He instinctively does not trust DeWitt, but in such dire financial straits, he has little choice but to go along with him. He has no idea why any of these people want to find Daphne. He doesn’t know why his life is in danger, or how to protect himself. The more people stick guns in his face, however, the more practiced he becomes at the art of self-preservation. Washington plays his journey gradually, assuredly; his growth happens so stealthily, it almost comes as a surprise to realize how much more capable the Easy at the end of the movie is compared to the one we meet at the beginning. 

And unlike nearly all the heroes of classic noir (the exceptions being Sidney Poitier in No Way Out and Harry Belafonte in Odds Against Tomorrow), Easy had another challenge to add to the pile: navigating white spaces as a Black man. Franklin and Mosley build this into the story on every level, from the inconvenience of having to sneak up to Daphne’s room in a segregated hotel, to the way a white woman making small talk nearly ends up getting him killed. As Franklin said in an interview with Slate, “If it was a Sam Spade character, you know there’s going to be the one cop who’s going to be cool with him, and the other cop is going to want to break his neck. In Easy’s case, both cops want to break his neck.”

Walter Mosley has written 16 Easy Rawlins books in all. The most recent one, Farewell, Amethystine, came out this year. Four had been published by the time the Devil In A Blue Dress movie was released, and Tri-Star had already optioned two more. With megastar Denzel Washington as the lead, and a rich vein of source material to tap, there were high hopes for franchise potential.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. Though it had roundly good reviews, Devil In A Blue Dress tanked at the box office (that it opened the week of the O.J. verdict didn’t help), taking the wind from the sails of any further outings. Even in the decades afterwards, further attempts at adaptation have stalled again and again. Nevertheless, the 1995 movie has only grown in status over the years, and in 2022 became a part of the Criterion Collection (followed in 2023 by Franklin’s One False Move). 

But that wasn’t the end for Washington and Franklin’s neo-noirs. In 2003, they teamed up again for Out Of Time.

Set in the present day, Out Of Time stars Denzel Washington as Matt Lee Whitlock, the chief of police in the small Floridian town of Banyan Key. Matt finds himself in hot water after his lover Ann (Sanaa Lathan) names him as the beneficiary of her life insurance policy just before she and her abusive husband Chris (Dean Cain) wind up dying in an arson-caused house fire. As his estranged wife Alex (Eva Mendez), newly promoted to detective, investigates, Matt must discover who actually killed them, while covering up the mounting pile of evidence that points to himself. 

While Devil In A Blue Dress had a classical genre milieu, Out Of Time was sunnily contemporary: the poster featured Washington in a Hawaiian shirt, and one of the pivotal set pieces is centered around a fax machine (okay, contemporary for 2003!). It’s a sexy, sweaty movie, very much of a piece with other entries into the subgenre of Florida Noir like Body Heat and Miami Blues.

Whereas in the earlier film, Easy is an essentially good man forced by circumstance into a cavalcade of bad situations, in Out Of Time, in true noir fashion, Matt is a little more morally gray. He’s having an affair. He steals from work. He lies to his wife over and over again. Sure, his lover’s husband is abusive, he thinks he’s stealing to pay for life-saving cancer treatment, and he doesn’t want to get arrested before he can find the real perpetrator—Matt’s still not exactly a bad guy.

But he’s significantly shadier than Easy. At the end of Devil In A Blue Dress, Easy looks back over his actions, the way he’s continued to associate with his loose cannon friend Mouse (Don Cheadle), even though he knows he’s capable of grievous wrongs, and ponders if he’s done the right thing. In Out Of Time, though his actions have been far more worthy of it, there’s no such reflection. The difference between the two roles echoes a transition in Washington’s career where, following on from Training Day two years earlier, he’d started to pivot towards characters without such a strong moral center. Though in both of his films with Franklin, his characters’ deeds are lightyears away from those his lethally corrupt cop commits in Training Day, the exploration of this gray area of morality, especially with an actor still best known for his many uncomplicatedly heroic roles, is what has made noir such a dramatically potent genre since its classical iteration. 

Out Of Time is—well, worthy of anyone’s time. The plotting is tight, and Franklin keeps things lean and pacy; things go wrong for Matt early, and they keep getting worse all the way up until the penultimate scene. The set pieces, especially the aforementioned fax machine extravaganza, are consistently exciting. Denzel Washington is as charming and dynamic as ever. Sure, there are moments that may elicit eyerolls—foremost among them, that Out Of Time tries to pretend that Washington and Sanaa Lathan fell in love at school when he was a senior and she was a freshman, despite the fact he’s 16 years older than her—but they’re never egregious enough to kill the momentum.

Though upon its initial release, Out Of Time performed similarly financially to Washington and Franklin’s previous neo-noir, in the years since, Out Of Time hasn’t attained the modern classic status of Devil In A Blue Dress. That it arrived outside of the 1990s neo-noir boom didn’t help matters. Nor did the fact that the film sits so close to other showier titles in Washington’s illustrious filmography, landing within three years of Training Day, Man On Fire, and Inside Man—movies that added intriguing, thorny new layers to Washington’s star persona, and took place on grander canvases, with higher stakes. However enjoyable, Washington and Franklin’s second collaboration is an undeniably more frivolous production. 

Yet taken together, Devil In A Blue Dress and Out Of Time are proof both of an undervalued actor-director duo, and of the enduring malleability of noir films: as history-reappraising works of art, as persona-shifting star vehicles, and as the engines of fun times at the movie theater. And hey, Washington, Franklin, and Mosley are all still with us—maybe it’s not too late for that Easy Rawlins sequel?