Chinatown is a film that at one time stood alone, having no other film to compare it to. It was even a breed apart from the classic black & white film noir/crime films that clearly inspired it. Subsequent attempts to duplicate the feeling of the original have failed. This includes the muddled Mulholland Falls and even the Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes. Much to audience's and critic's surprise, however, two films were released several years apart in the 1990's that did the genre proud in their own distinct way.

Devil in a Blue Dress does not put us in the shoes of a hard boiled detective, but instead an earnest WWII veteran named Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington). He used to work at an aircraft plant, but was recently dismissed and is now looking at a stack of bills on his new house with no way to pay them. Then a man named DeWitt Albright (Tom Sizemore) offers him big money for a simple job: find out where a woman named Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals) disappeared to. Needless to say, things get quickly complicated and dangerous for Easy. So much so that he calls in some backup in the form of his old friend from Houston, Mouse Alexander (Don Cheadle). He's going to need all the help he can get before it's all over.

L.A. Confidential is the epic story of three very flawed cops in 1950's Los Angeles. There's Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), who works with tabloid reporter Sid Hudgens (Danny Devito) in order to make glamorous pot busts and get his name in the papers. There's Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce), who's dedication to the rules is matched only by his ambition to get ahead. And then there's Bud White (Russell Crowe), a man whose brute force tactics are used to their best advantage by Police Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell). All three men's lives will come together through a series of crimes that they must work together in order to solve.

I mention quite a few character in the two synopsis above, and it was an effort to summarize the two films without mentioning more. Like classic Noir films as The Big Sleep, the flood of character names can sometimes be overwhelming. All the better for a twisty plot where bodies keep floating to the surface and everyone is double-crossing everyone else. L.A. Confidential itself has 80 speaking parts. It's a testament to the filmmaking that it's easy enough to keep them all straight. Devil in a Blue Dress doesn't have to contend with as many and thus has a simpler time of it. Washington's voiceovers (a classic Noir element that is not found in Confidential) help to further clarify things when they get murky.

This disparity in amounts of actors correlates to the leads, as well. Blue Dress is all about Washington, and he's pretty much on his own until Cheadle shows up half way through. The character of Easy is an everyman who is put into dangerous circumstances, and Denzel plays this very well. His character adapts to the circumstances, but it's clear to both him and the audience that he still needs help. Cheadle, who drew quite few raves at the time for this role, definitely livens up the proceedings with his hair-trigger yet genial character. He's the kind of guy who, as soon as we see his first five minutes on screen, we think, "Denzel's definitely going to come out of this alive."