"Actor: Jernard Burks"

• Devil in a Blue Dress | DVD | (05/09/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  It's 1948 and Los Angeles is booming but Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington) has seen better days. He has just been fired and his house payments are due so when DeWitt Albright (Tom Sizemore) offers him a seemingly harmless job he jumps at the chance. All he has to do is track down the elusive Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals) a mysterious beauty known to keep company on the wrong side of town. Soon he finds himself implicated in two murders and is forced to call upon an old friend Mouse (Don Cheadle) who is all too familiar with the violent world Easy has landed himself in. Slowly drawn deeper and deeper into a web of blackmail dirty cops and even dirtier politicians the ways out for Easy become harder and harder to find.

• Devil In A Blue Dress | DVD | (15/05/2000) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £3.99

  Despite rave reviews as one of the most stylish and intelligent detective pictures in a number of years, this 1995 adaptation of Walter Mosley's novel never found a mass audience. Too bad, because Carl Franklin's film is nearly perfect in every way, from its rich, shadowy look to its depiction of life in post-World War II black America (LA-style) to the acting of Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle and others. Washington plays Easy Rawlins, an aircraft factory worker who is laid off only to find his true calling: as a private eye, albeit an unlicensed one. Hired to find a missing woman, he becomes entangled in a complex but satisfying case involving sex, corruption, racism and, of course, money. Devil In A Blue Dress is top-notch from top to bottom--and Cheadle is dangerously funny as Easy's best friend, a killer named Mouse. --Marshall Fine, Amazon.com