LIVE FILM PROGRAM (ALSO AVAILABLE ONLINE THROUGH ZOOM & VIMEO)
Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995, 102min.)
Linda DeLibero, senior lecturer and special advocate for alumni and outreach, and former director of the JHU film and media studies program
Carl Franklin’s adaptation of Walter Mosley’s first published novel from1992—which introduced his ground-breaking Black detective, Easy Rawlins, to the world—presents a lush, seedy post-WW II LA that channels great neo-noir films like Chinatown and LA Confidential as much as it does its source material. But Devil also mixes its skillful approach to the usual genre tropes (femme fatale, rampant corruption, shocking plot twists) with a quietly devastating exposé of racial bigotry, and provides a stunning visual representation of the world Mosley exposed to his readers: the postwar Southern Black community that emigrated to California in search of an elusive American Dream. A slow-burning Denzel Washington as Rawlins holds his own against Don Cheadle’s explosive, scene-stealing performance as his near-psychotic companion, Mouse.
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Film Series Overview - Take 2: Cinematic Adaptations of the Written Word
Adapting any creative work from one medium into a vastly different one is always tricky. Readers of literature, in particular, tend to feel a very strong ownership of any source novel or story that gets the cinematic treatment, and often complain about how much the book has been altered—usually not for the better—in its transformation. But writers and film directors work under vastly different imperatives, and what is good as text may not be good as image, and vice versa. The best adaptations are often those where, faithful or not to the book, the director has a vision, and the movie has a raison d'être beyond the mercenary. Join us as we examine six provocative literary adaptations and explore how the written word translates to the screen. And don’t worry: if you don’t have time to read the original text, we’ll explain how the films compare and contrast with their sources. In order, our movies are Luce (Julius Onah, 2019), Elle (Paul Verhoeven, 2016), The Furies (Anthony Mann, 1950), Purple Noon (René Clément, 1960), Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995), and Border (Ali Abbasi, 2018).