Franklin, who grew up in Northern California, spent the first part of his career in show business as an actor. While he never landed any major roles, he had a prolific run playing supporting characters, particularly on television, turning up in some of the most popular series of the \u201870s and \u201880s (including Good Times<\/em>, The Incredible Hulk<\/em>, The Rockford Files<\/em>, The A-Team<\/em> and Roseanne<\/em>). Eventually, he realized that his true calling was directing, and so enrolled in the American Film Institute, where he made his well-received thesis film, Punk<\/em> (1986). That short\u2014about a young boy in South Central Los Angeles who is almost molested by an ice cream vendor\u2014signaled Franklin\u2019s, who is Black, interest in social realist drama, the same which would define his later masterpieces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From there, Franklin was able to break into feature filmmaking the same way so many of his and the previous generation did: by making low-budget pictures for producer Roger Corman. Under the banner of Corman\u2019s New Concorde, Franklin cut his teeth on half-a-dozen movies, directing three: 1989\u2019s Nowhere to Run<\/em> and Eye of the Eagle 2: Inside the Enemy<\/em>, and 1990\u2019s Full Fathom Five<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Around this same time, a struggling young musician\/actor from Arkansas named Billy Bob Thorton was trying to make his name in Hollywood. Like Franklin, he\u2019d managed to land a few small roles in film and television, but he was having a harder go of it. One night, while working as a caterer at a big Hollywood dinner, he was engaged in conversation by one of the guests: none other than legendary screenwriter and director Billy Wilder (who, of course, made three of the all-time greatest film noirs in Double Indemnity<\/em>, Sunset Boulevard<\/em>, and Ace in the Hole<\/em>). Having some mean fun at Thorton\u2019s expense (although the two would later become friends), Wilder told him he was too ugly to make it as an actor and should try writing scripts instead. Thorton took his advice and, with the help of childhood friend and roommate Tom Epperson, began pumping out scripts, one of which would prove both he and Franklin\u2019s\u2014brought on board by the film\u2019s producers who were equally impressed by his student thesis and work as a hired hand\u2014ticket to the big time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Set between Thorton\u2019s adopted home of Los Angeles and his birthplace of Arkansas (and greatly inspired by his favorite film, High Noon<\/em>), One False Move<\/em> follows a trio of violent criminals and a small-town Southern sheriff on a doomed collision course. After killing six people during a drug robbery, ex-prison buddies Pluto (Michael Beach) and Ray (Thorton, landing his first big role in his own script), as well as Ray\u2019s mixed-race girlfriend Fantasia (Cynda Williams), head to Chicago to sell their stolen dope. The LAPD detectives assigned to the case (Jim Meztler and Earl Billings) learn that they may also be stopping in Ray\u2019s hometown of Star City Arkansas. They rendezvous with the local sheriff, a motor-mouthed, friendly, but casually racist hayseed named Dale \u201cHurricane\u201d Dixon (Bill Paxton) who dreams of moving to Los Angeles and becoming a big city detective. As the tensions in both groups reach their boiling points and the bodies continue to stack up, we learn of a troubling past connection between Hurricane and Fantasia, one which takes what has been, up to this point, an unsettling thriller of clockwork precision and turns it into a deeper and even more unsettling rumination on race, power, abuse, and redemption. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As Roger Ebert\u2014who\u2019s championship of the film, alongside his television partner Gene Siskel (they named it their #2 and #1 picks for best film of 1992, respectively) was mainly responsible for getting it a proper theatrical run after an initial straight-to-video release\u2014wrote in his rave review<\/a>, One False Move <\/em>\u201cbegins as a crime story and ends as a human story.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Franklin is able to imbue his film with such cathartic force by focusing on the interpersonal relationships, rather than the grand twists, stylized dialog or action, or formalist tricks so prevalent in other crime films from the time. This, in turn, makes the violence that is in the film all the more impactful and shocking, despite the fact that it\u2019s far less graphic than the viewer remembers (this is perhaps the only thing it has in common with the other directorial crime film breakout of 1992, Reservoir Dogs<\/em>). In this, Franklin is greatly helped by his cast, which include a coldly villainous performance in Beach\u2019s Pluto, what should have been a star making turn from Williams as the wounded, tragic Fantasia, and especially Paxton. He gives a career best\u2014and that\u2019s fucking saying something\u2014performance, taking a character who might have proven irredeemable and noxious in other hands, and making him into one of the most complex examples of naked humanity in any movie from its time (or since).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Off the strength of One False Move\u2019<\/em>s critical acclaim, Franklin was in high demand with the studios (whose producers, according to him, were often shocked to discover that he was Black) and was able to choose his next project. Sticking around the dark street and crooked alleyways of noir, he opted to adapt Walter Mosely\u2019s best-selling mystery novel from 1990, Devil in a Blue Dress<\/em>, which he\u2019d been introduced to during production on One False Move<\/em>. In a fortuitous series of events, Franklin was sought out by fellow Corman alumni Jonathan Demme, who was looking to produce something. Demme set him up at Tri-Star, which had recently purchased the rights to the novel from Universal, as well as Denzel Washington, with whom Demme had recently worked on Philadelphia <\/em>and who had also been interested in bringing Mosley\u2019s novel to the screen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Said novel is a spin on the classic hard-boiled private eye story as delineated in the novels (and subsequent movie adaptations) of Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon<\/em>, The Thin Man<\/em>) and Raymond Carver (The Big Sleep<\/em>, The Long Goodbye<\/em>), but told through the point of view of Black America. Set in 1948, Devil<\/em> follows Texas transplant and ex-GI Easy Rawlins (Washington), hired by shady interests to find the runaway girlfriend of a rich mayoral candidate thought to be hiding around the Watts\/Central Avenue area of Los Angeles. What starts out as a simple job takes a dangerous turn after a friend and lover of Easy\u2019s ends up murdered as the result of his search, and soon enough, he\u2019s mixed up with racist cops, vicious bootleggers and triggermen, corrupt and perverted politicians, and the (seemingly) devilish femme fatale of the title.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If Devil<\/em> is not as immediately gripping or ultimately emotionally devastating as One False Move<\/em>\u2014and really, few films are; writer and host of TCM\u2019s Noir Alley Eddie Mueller was dead right when he declared<\/a> it \u201cone of the best crime movies made in this country in the last 50 years\u201d\u2014it is still a relentlessly entertaining and rewatchable mystery. Like One False Move<\/em>, its power comes from Franklin\u2019s emphasis on character and place. As Franklin himself explained, he approached the material not with a post-modern sense of nostalgia (as did so many of the other neo-noirs that came out adjacent to it), but through the lens of social realism. This wasn\u2019t an easy task, given that the film is a period piece. Between the riots that tore through Watts in 1965 and 1992, there wasn\u2019t much of the infrastructure from the \u201840s left in that neighborhood. Still, what Franklin and his team were able to accomplish on a (relatively) modest budget is incredible, the setting and set dressing\u2014including the period specific clothes and cars\u2014all feel lived in, rather than flashy. Combined with Tak Fujimoto\u2019s moody but un-ostentatious cinematography, Franklin is able to create a film that feels of a piece with the classic Hollywood titles it\u2019s inspired by, rather than a pastiche.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Once again, he\u2019s greatly bolstered by his cast. Denzel gives one of his most charismatic performances, while Don Cheadle steals the show\u2014and makes his name\u2014playing Easy\u2019s loyal, but fearsome and psychotic hometown running buddy Mouse, a character who comes off like a combination of One False Move\u2019s<\/em> Pluto and Hurricane. It really is a shame that we didn\u2019t get at least a couple more adaptations of Mosely\u2019s Rawlins mysteries starring these two.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The film, like Mosely\u2019s novel, also serves as a necessary and much-needed course correction to the noir cannon. It\u2019s not as though there wasn\u2019t a long lineage of crime cinema and literature told from the Black perspective prior to them, but they was often, even usually, ghettoized. That\u2019s a term I use consciously\u2014most of the black crime films that came out around the same time as Franklin\u2019s work centered on drug and gang violence in poor neighborhoods. While such stories are as legitimate as any other, the prevalence of them had a culturally reductive effect. Franklin\u2019s films, by contrast, while still focused on crime, showed a different aspect of said experience (and that includes the brief, but remarkably empathetic depiction of the inner-city drug trade in One False Move<\/em>). This is especially true of Devil<\/em>, which, for as much violence and illicit activity as it contains, is ultimately about the restoration of peace and order to a tight-knit, working class community (which, some would claim, as they have of Chandler\u2019s work, that this means it\u2019s not<\/em> actually noir, since noir is all about fatalism and doom, but that\u2019s a much larger argument). <\/p>\n\n\n\n The ability to foreground racial politics into his work without coming off as didactic or ham-fisted has always been one Franklin\u2019s greatest strengths as a filmmaker. In his aforementioned review of One False Move<\/em>, Ebert wrote \u201cthe movie is not about black-white \u201crelationships\u201d in the dreary way of so many other recent movies, which are motivated either by idealistic bonhomie or the cliches of ethnic stereotypes.\u201d This would be a thorny point if made today (at least coming as it does from Ebert, a white man), but it strikes a chord, nonetheless. The push to tell diverse stories in film and television has resulted in lots of fraught discourse over politics\u2014particularly racial politics\u2014in art. And for as easy as it is to dismiss much of this as the reactionary tantrums of spoiled white conservatives (and it is), there has also been an undeniable push from those on the opposite end of the political spectrum against stories that tackle charged subject matter\u2014such as they kind found in One False Move<\/em>\u2014from a nonjudgmental, humanist angle, rather than a prescriptive or revolutionary one. All of which is simply to say that Franklin\u2019s approach, which feels neither subtle nor overwrought, but simply natural, gives his work a refreshing and indeed timeless feel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Post-Devil, <\/em>Franklin has made only four features. By no means a bust\u2014his 2002 courtroom mystery High Crimes<\/em> is an enjoyable and well-made (if too glossy) piece of entertainment and his 2003 reunion with Denzel for the cop thriller Out of Time<\/em> is a total blast (although it\u2019s not nearly as sleazy as it should be)\u2014it can\u2019t help but be regarded as disappointing when you consider how good that neo-noir one-two is. But that also goes a ways towards explaining his absence from movie screens: Franklin has said<\/a> that he never wanted to be pigeonholed as a director of thrillers, as his main interest has always been human drama. That makes his decision to turn down most of the genre projects offered to him and instead focus on \u201cprestige\u201d television\u2014where he\u2019s been very prolific, directing episodes for series such as The Pacific<\/em>, Homeland<\/em>, The Leftovers<\/em> and Mindhunter<\/em>\u2014more understandable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, 30 years on from his feature breakout, it\u2019s time to give Devil<\/em>, and especially One False Move<\/em>, their due. With ‘Devil In a Blue Dress’ joining the Criterion Collection, a deep dive on the man who made it – and the first-rate crime picture that got him the gig.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":506,"featured_media":18584,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1422],"class_list":["post-18581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/506"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21926,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18581\/revisions\/21926"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/one-false-move-1024x578.jpg\")
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