Femme Fatale in a Blue Dress

Beals in a powder blue housecoat

Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) presents a classic noir plot in a neo-noir film. The movie based on Walter Mosley's book by the same title, features Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals) as a soft-spoken, sizzling femme with a secret. As the movie rolls along, the audience is never quite sure whether she's a fatale or a victim. In the end she is a combination of both.

* Spoilers Ahead *

The antihero, Easy Rawlins played by Denzel Washington, is fascinated yet unsure about the "white woman" he is tasked with finding. She is enticing and sexy, yet he hesitates because she's white. Daphne reinforces her perceived skin color by staying at a white hotel where the porter will have to sneak Easy Rawlins up the back stairs. But skin color is not always what it seems.

It's obvious that Daphne is hiding something. The audience finds out towards the end that Ms. Monet is at least half white and then a lot of pieces start to fall into place. Her politically powerful ex-fiance was forced to break up with her over her black family tree. Sadly, she thinks she can get him back by blackmailing his political enemy, but that just ends up getting her kidnapped and almost killed while forcing her to come to terms with her black heritage in the white Los Angeles of the late 1940s.

The problem with this femme fatale is that she believes in love. She thinks by getting the goods on her ex's political enemies, he will take her back and they will live "happily ever after," or something approaching a noir happy ending, but this is noir no one is going to go home with their true love.

The costumes for Devil in a Blue Dress were created by Sharen Davis who also worked on Dream Girls (2006) and The Help (2011). The best dress is the powder blue housecoat above. It's sexy and resembles the 1940s lounge wear found in many early films without being derivative. However, the two-tone dress and the blue embroidered dresses don't quite hit the mark. One of the things about all these costumes is they appear to be too big for Jennifer Beals. While the shoulders should be padded, the sleeve seam needs to stop at the edge of the shoulder. In the two tone dress you can see the sag under the arm and it's not a raglan sleeve. When looking at the embroidered dress the decolletage is too baggy. This may be a sign of the times when the movie was released, 1995, a time when clothes were worn bigger, especially by the sagging male sex. Sadly, this movie isn't much of an inspiration for classic noir fashion with one big exception.While blue, especially light blue, was not the most popular of clothing colors in the 1940s due to war shortages, the greatest thing about the fashions in this film is color, especially the red lip. In classic noir you never see color. Noir movies were low budget B-roll black-and-white films that had no special effects and very little color. Jennifer Beals' red lip stands out in this film and makes one wonder what Barbara Standwick in Double Indemnity or Lauren Bacall in Dark Passage would have looked like in technicolor clothes and the classic red lip . . . not to mention the coats, hats, and gowns. Don't get me wrong, the last thing I want to see is the colorized version of Maltese Falcon, but it does make me realize that in the 1940s when you were resizing your husband's suits to get to work, the only color you had was that striking red lip.