PAGE TO SCREEN : Another Big Easy

In Walter Mosley’s “Devil in a Blue Dress,” our hero, Easy Rawlins, is soft-boiled. His chief assets are his Everyman qualities, his integrity and his skin color, which enables him to go where few detectives have gone before: the homes and clubs and storefronts of black L.A., circa 1948. These qualities give the story of his search for a missing white girl, which is incredibly complicated and involves murderers, blackmailers, bootleggers and mayoral candidates, an almost anthropological appeal. And although the racism of this period is overt and appalling, you can’t help feeling nostalgic for a time when people looked out for one other.

Uppermost in writer-director Carl Franklin’s mind in adapting this book to the big screen was to keep these qualities while streamlining the plot. Among other things, out went Easy’s World War II history and his early life in Houston (Easy is played by Denzel Washington). A character killed offstage was eliminated, and in at least one instance, the identity of a murderer was changed for the sake of clarity. The other fundamental changes involved character motivations.

“Always in film we’re trying to heighten the stakes,” Franklin says.

In the book, the missing girl, Daphne (played by Jennifer Beals), is mistress to a big-shot banker, relieves him of $30,000 and has a roll in the hay with the compliant Easy. On screen, her character is older and much more marriageable, and her actions are prompted by love rather than greed or revenge. Losing her is therefore of greater consequence to the banker. Unfortunately, the downside of this strategy is that Easy and Daphne never get together, which may leave some audiences unsatisfied.

Easy agrees to find Daphne because he’s lost his job and he has to pay a mortgage. Much screen and page time is given over to how he loves his house and how committed he is to the neighborhood. Franklin had to dramatize these feelings without belaboring them, so he came up with the adaptation’s one wholly fabricated character, a nut case who wanders up and down Easy’s street trying to chop down trees.

“Even though he’s a nuisance, he’s someone who everyone in the neighborhood relates to,” says Franklin. “In the end, he’s one more loving image of the neighborhood, all building to what Easy was striving for, which was to save his house and his piece of the American Dream.”