DOWN THESE MEAN, PALM-LINED STREETS

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Easy Rawlins is a private citizen, not strictly speaking a private eye. He is also a black man. But these two significant--and dramatically potent--differences aside, novelist Walter Mosley's creation is the truest heir we have yet had to Raymond Chandler's immortal Philip Marlowe. And writer-director Carl Franklin's cool, expert adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress, Mosley's first novel, evokes the spirit of '40s film noir more effectively than any movie since Chinatown.

This is not just a matter of recapturing the look of postwar Los Angeles or making an attractive figure of a smart, righteous loner. It requires as well a taste for labyrinthine plotting (and a confidence that the audience will pay close attention to it despite the lack of car chases and explosions); a gift for bizarre, boldly stated characterizations (often enough hinting at sexual kinks); and, most important, a nose for social nuance.

Mosley, like Chandler, sets a seemingly simple task for his hero--in this instance, Easy (Denzel Washington) is hired to find a young woman (Jennifer Beals), mistress to a wealthy candidate for mayor, who has gone missing--but one that will lead him eventually from lowlife bars and jazz clubs to the mansions of the rich and respectable. Who are then revealed to be the source of all civic corruption. Precisely because Easy is black and an unlicensed investigator, his journey through the social strata is much more perilous than Marlowe's ever was. In Los Angeles 50 years ago a "Negro" risked his life (or anyway a nasty beating) if he was found in a white neighborhood or in the company of a white woman. And the cops, of course, could be counted on to treat him with brutal contempt (perhaps the only American tradition that has survived intact to this day).

There are other, subtler differences between Easy and his predecessor. He owns a trim little house (complete with worrisome mortgage), yearns for the settled life and narrates his adventures in a style that avoids the lush metaphors Chandler favored. He even has a sidekick, Mouse (Don Cheadle), a genial psychopath in a bowler hat, comically eager to rub out anyone who crosses his path, whether he deserves it or not. He's a scene stealer, but so is everyone else Easy encounters: the nervously sexyBeals, a brutal-funny fixer with ambiguous loyalties (Tom Sizemore), an epicene politician (Maury Chaykin). But Washington, like the character he plays, knows how to roll with their punches. Reserved but agile, wary but thrusting when he needs to be, he gracefully reanimates a lost American archetype, the lonely lower-class male absorbing more cigarette smoke, bourbon whiskey and nasty beatings than is entirely healthy, as he pursues miscreants and moral imperatives down mean, palm-lined streets.