Denzel Washington: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

5 Awesome Performances...

5. Ezekiel 'Easy' Rawlins - Devil In A Blue Dress

Walter Mosley's hardboiled detective novel stood out from the bloated, slightly stagnant field of its competitors upon publication in 1990 for exactly on reason: it's private detective protagonist was black. Well, it also stood out because Mosely's a fantastic writer who can conjure up the darker sides of LA with an evocative turn of phrase, and because Easy Rawlins is a fantastic creation, but it also helped to get a different spin on a genre that so often starred Sam Spades and Philip Marlowes, often played by equally whitebread actors in their big screen film noir adaptations. For the movie version of Devil In A Blue Dress director Carl Franklin, rather smartly, went for an actor who could imbue Rawlins with as much character and nuance as Mosley did on the page. Step forward Denzel, wearing the requisite gumshoe trench coat, fedora and hangdog expression, but otherwise essaying a completely different kind of detective, who starts his voiceover with the question "A man once told me that when you step out of your door in the morning, you're already in trouble. The only question is, are you on top of that trouble or not?" Rawlins is very much on top of things in Washington's portrayal, shrugging off a redundancy as a manual labourer and quickly falling into detective work to pay the bills. The star gives the character a warmth that many of the troubled, messy classic PIs lack, with a different kind of confidence and brooding than even Bogart managed.