Devil in a Blue Dress

Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) is a sharp noir thriller directed by Carl Franklin — watch it online on iFILM. Denzel Washington plays Easy Rawlins, a Black World War II veteran back in Los Angeles and suddenly jobless, who takes a hundred dollars to find a white woman named Daphne Monet. She was last spotted in the jazz clubs of the Black neighborhood — somewhere no white detective will go. Easy goes.

The job unravels fast. One secret hides another, politicians have things to protect, and bodies start turning up. Tom Sizemore plays the man who hired Easy; Jennifer Beals is the elusive Daphne; Don Cheadle steals scenes as Mouse, Easy's dangerously impulsive old friend from Texas. Cheadle got an Independent Spirit Award nomination for the role — and earns every frame of it.

Franklin adapted the first novel in Walter Mosley's acclaimed Rawlins series and built a period Los Angeles that feels lived in: the racial fault lines of the late 1940s, corrupt city hall, and the specific social geography of a city that promised opportunity and delivered something harder. Stream Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) online on iFILM.