LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 27

1 ('AST IE ROCK BORDERS' IXlmtlNtlllll BOOKS-MUSIC -CAFE present a BOOK SIGNING with author! 'screenwriter Shane Connaughton a football player. That kind of thing was a bit disconcerting. Now you have several legitimate black stars who are actors, who have trained to do nothing else Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, Morgan Freeman, Laurence Fishburne, Danny Glover, Forest Whitaker. Most of them do stage as well, and theyre serious, committed artists. They are getting movies made based on being the sole stars of those Films." But these are all actors (and men).

Directing is a different story. Hollywood has carved out its own private place for filmmakers of color. No one asks a white director to make a film about the white experience. No one would dream of stopping a white director from making films about people of color. (No one except Spike Lee, who successfully argued Malcolm away from director Norman Jewison.) Black directors if they are hired at all are expected to make movies about fatherless boys triumphing magically over, or succumbing tragically to, ghetto poverty and crime.

Franklin has no intention of ignoring these issues, but neither is he willing to have them be black property alone. Along with a small but growing number of other filmmakers of color he cites Lee and Bill Duke specifically Franklin is reclaiming the meaning of a black film and using black perspectives to illuminate problems of powerlessness every where. I always look for a universal theme to unearth, he says. My ethnicity is a plus, a tool. It gives me ammunition in terms of the way I view the world.

There are certain stories in the black community that inform us all." The two principal black characters in One False Move are as deeply flawed and complex as its lone white hero. With Devil in a Blue Dress, Franklin again transcends the color line and engages with it, finding a balance between the highly personal story of a man whos unfairly fired and threatened with the loss of his home, and the common theme of a man who makes a pact with the devil, only to overcome fear and oppression. The same complexity, the same open-mindedness, the same productive tensions between the specific and the universal, inform the various projects Franklin has in mind for the future, including one based on an old favorite. Ive always been fascinated by Alexandre Dumas and The Count of Monte Cristo he says, of the celebrated epic written by one of the worlds least famous black men. Having traveled the road from movable prop to Hollywoods newest, most intriguing mover and shaker, Franklin may be the first African-American director to put into practice the right that white filmmakers have always taken for granted the right to make a movie about whatever the hell he pleases.

EJ fiteouno god 09 crusading mayor, and since then Daphnes gone missing. Because shes known to stray into the company of black men she favors the color blue, too Albright figures on Easy to search her out. (She likes jazz, pigs feet and dark meat, know what I mean?) The pay is a hundred, and more than enough to take care of Easys later-than-late mortgage. Easy goes to look for Daphne and eventually finds her, but only after hes plunged in intrigue born of political, racial and sexual secrets. As it happens, some of those secrets arent all that obscure, specifically the central mystery, which works fine in the novel but doesnt make sense in the film because of one curiously misguided casting choice.

That the key revelation stuns anyone will reflect more on the audience than on the movie itself; its a mistake in the end, but not ruinous. All it proves is that Franklins heart lies less with the mechanics of mystery, the specifications of genre, than the ways in which Easy commandeers those specifications to his own ends. Mosleys take on detective fiction gets its heat from the fact that it puts front and center a character usually seen on the sly, washing floors in Philip Marlowes office, say, or taking a white mans raincoat for a 5-cent tip. Play it again, Sam. Franklins adaptation improves on Mosleys original its faster and much leaner, and knows to hit the funny notes as well as those more hard-boiled.

Its surprises arent in empty cigarette packages and dribbles of blood, but in unfathomables like love and hate, and the way a man called Mouse can be Easys oldest friend in the world and still turn a gun on him at the end of a long, drunken night. Mouse is the single biggest shock in Devil in a Blue Dress, which has as much to do with Don Cheadles ferocious, heart-stopping performance as it does with the script or the direction. Short, compact, with lustrous ebony skin and a gold cap that catches light, Cheadle enters laughing, maybe because he knows hes about to steal home. Washington may never have been as good (and for once seems to enjoy his status as a reigning box-office fleshpot), but he pales significantly next to Cheadle, who digs into Mouse and pulls up a few demons not fully expected. The characters and concerns of Devil in a Blue Dress are new to the American screen, as are its sense of place and reason for being.

Even its moves are different (but really, its jazz). For all of its convolutions, the first half of the movie holds to a deliberate, occasionally slow pace, with few fluctuations in tone its easy does it. Theres some well-trod back-and-forth as money changes hands and information gets swapped. Albright pressures Easy, Easy trails Daphne. Then the cops hassle Easy, and he puts the squeeze on someone else.

Borders are crossed, neighborhoods trespassed; a black man takes a walk on the wild side, which in this case means a drive through Malibu Canyon, designation: whites only. The pace picks up, the body count does too. Mouse makes a kill, and later he and Easy make a couple more. Rage floods the scene, then drops to a savage whisper. When Easy takes up Albrights offer to track down the missing Daphne Monet, the first devil he meets is a corpulent creep with a pet baby boy.

The second devil wears a sky-blue dress; the third, a crisp fedora and a neatly pressed suit. And then theres the devil who stares back in the mirror when things go sour, and the one who comes up from Texas with two cocked guns and a swallowing grin, a Southern Gothic gone north to remind Easy vhere hes come from and where he is headed. They thought I was some kind of new fool, says Easy at one point in voice-over, to no one in particular, and I guess that I was. For better and sometimes worse, Easy has left Joppys bar for good. Hes put the noir in film noir and crossed on over into the world; theres no turning back.

But the sun, it still rises.Q The Run of the Country authorscreenwriter will be signing copies of his novel SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 3 PM at BORDERS 330 S. La Cienega Los Angeles The Run of the Country from Castle Rock Entertainment directed by Peter Yates and starring Albert Finney opens at theatres on Friday, September 22 SEPTEMBER 22-SEPTEMBER 28, 1995 LA WEEKLY 27.