The word “noir” is French for “black”, but ironically, the Golden Age of noir is typically white. It’s white criminals and white cops where the “blackness” comes from the cynicism and fatalism inherent in the genre. Black characters were typically pushed aside as they were through most of Hollywood’s history, relegated to playing subservient characters until well into the 1960s when the noir genre was giving way to New Hollywood and the directors that would bring its biting cynicism well past where it to be previously subsumed by the Production Code.

Noir didn’t disappear, but it had to change and evolve. That evolution is blindingly clear in two brilliant neo-noirs of the 1990s with director Carl Franklin’s One False Move (1992) and his follow-up, Devil in a Blue Dress (1995). Franklin, a Black filmmaker who worked as an actor through the 1970s and 80s before moving behind the camera, has had a long and successful career working on such acclaimed dramas as House of Cards, Homeland, The Leftovers, and Mindhunter. But the start of his feature directing career with One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress is one of the more remarkable early one-two punches for a filmmaker.

One False Move doesn’t reveal what it’s doing until its second act turn, so I won’t spoil that here. The film begins with criminals Ray (Billy Bob Thornton) and Pluto (Michael Beach) committing a string of violent murders in Los Angeles to rip-off some local drug dealers. They’ve got Ray’s girlfriend Fantasia (Cynda Williams) in tow and are headed to Texas to sell the cocaine they’ve stolen to some of Pluto’s former associates. A couple of L.A. cops, Dud (Jim Metzler) and McFeely (Earl Billings), make their way to Star City, Arkansas, because they believe Ray might meet up with his uncle. The L.A. cops team up with the local chief of police, Dale “Hurricane” Dixon” (Bill Paxton), an excitable, almost childishly naïve guy who’s thrilled to be working on a murder case with these big city detectives.

Cynda Williams in One False Move
Image via I.R.S. Releasing

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For its first two-thirds, One False Move lulls you into thinking that it’s about an urban/rural divide. You’ve got criminals and cops headed from one of the country’s biggest cities towards one of its smallest communities. Dale brags that he’s never even had to draw his gun in the six years since he’s been chief, and yet he has no problem entertaining the idea that he could move out to L.A. and work cases alongside Dud and McFeely. Meanwhile, while Ray comes from rural roots, he has all the ruthlessness we associate with city life, especially paired with the brilliant sociopath Pluto. But even here, Franklin plays with our expectations by casting a Black man to play Pluto, working against the popular perception that all brilliant serial killers must be white for some reason.

But a second act reveal turns the entire movie on its head, and shows that Franklin, working from a script by Thornton and Tom Epperson, is really telling a story about racial conflict, and the limitations (or lack thereof) for people of different colors. To say more would spoil what the film is trying to do, and since One False Move isn’t some major sensation (the film almost went straight-to-video until critical acclaim was able to net it a theatrical release), I’m not going to reveal its plot points on the assumption you’ve seen it. I will simply say that even within the simple mold of a cops-and-criminals narrative, Franklin tells a much larger story about America and the costs we pay when white people blithely place themselves as the heroes of every narrative.

The color lines become even clearer with Devil in a Blue Dress, which Franklin wrote as well as directed, based off the book by Walter Mosley. Set in post-war Los Angeles, the story follows veteran Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins (Denzel Washington) who is looking for work after being laid off from his job at Champion Aircraft. The opportunity arises when he meets fixer Dewitt Albright (Tom Sizemore), who is looking for Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals), the wife of the powerful Todd Carter (Terry Kinney) and who enjoys the company of Black men. Albright claims that she’s likely to frequent Black clubs, which is why he needs Easy to investigate. However, Easy’s investigation leads to startling revelations far beyond the simple contours of a missing person case.

Denzel Washington in Devil in a Blue Dress
Image via Sony

Given its setting and plot, Devil in a Blue Dress wisely uses the more conventional trappings of noir and then Franklin blows them up by asking how a Black man would go about playing private detective. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe never have to worry about places they can’t go or being hassled by the cops based on the color of their skin. Meanwhile, Easy is a firmly blue-collar guy (he wears his Champion Aircraft” jacket for most of the movie) whose main preoccupation is paying his mortgage so he can cling to his piece of the American dream. Franklin knows that by changing the complexion of his lead, he’s changed the entire complexion of the surrounding narrative, so that while the plot may play by the beats of noir, it has a completely different tune.

And yet Devil in a Blue Dress, through its own reveal, is much more than “a film noir but make the characters Black.” Again, Franklin is exploring notions of who gets to be considered worthy of narrative, and what those narratives say about people especially once you reach the intersection of white and Black relationships, particularly with regards to biracial people. What lines are white people willing to cross, and why do they find the color line so frightening and overwhelming? Franklin isn’t making a period piece about what life was like in 1948 Los Angeles for Black people; he’s telling a story about the 1990s, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, audiences weren’t willing to hear it. Despite the film’s critical acclaim, Devil in a Blue Dress flopped at the box office. Two years later, another R-rated neo-noir set in post-war Los Angeles, L.A. Confidential, would gross $126.2 million worldwide as well as picking up nine Oscar nominations including Best Picture.

That’s not to denigrate L.A. Confidential, which is a great film in its own right, but you’ve likely seen it. Meanwhile, One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress have continued to fly under the radar (neither film is currently available on Blu-ray in the U.S.), and they deserve more attention for how they expanded the noir genre thanks to Franklin’s keen eye and social commentary. Thankfully, you can currently stream both movies, and they would make for a terrific double feature.

One False Move is streaming on Criterion Channel until April 30th.

Devil in a Blue Dress is streaming on Prime Video and Hulu.

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