When asked about it at the Music Box in 2018, he made the point that film noir as a genre has always been valued by critics and film buffs more so than general audiences. Over the years, Franklin has mused over the film's failure at the box office. Despite these twin movements, "Devil in a Blue Dress" did poorly at the box office, grossing just over $16 million in the United States and shutting down any plans for a sequel. The film arrived at the crossroads of two contemporary filmmaking trends: A boom in dramas geared toward African American audiences by directors like Spike Lee, John Singleton, Julie Dash, and the Hughes Brothers and a mini-resurgence in films with a noir sensibility and aesthetic like John Dahl's "Red Rock West" and "The Last Seduction," the Coen brothers' "Miller's Crossing," and even Tim Burton's trenchcoat-and-fedora-clad "Batman" movies. Restoring Mouse to the narrative not only gave Cheadle the breakout role of his career, but also arguably the best line in the film, as Mouse justifies his killing of Easy's treacherous friend Joppy ( the late Mel Winkler): "Easy, if you ain't want him killed, why'd you leave him with me?" Once the project was taken over by Sony, Franklin was allowed to adapt the film himself, discarding Mosley's draft and the changes he had made. While "Devil" was in development at Universal, Mosley had written a draft of the screenplay himself, where he had combined the characters of Easy and Mouse in order to make Easy more of an active protagonist. Cheadle and Mouse enter the film around the halfway point like a bolt of lightning, bringing a livewire energy and smiling menace to every scene, and for his efforts Cheadle was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award and won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actor.Īmazingly, Mouse was almost not in the film at all. Cheadle had been kicking around Hollywood for nearly a decade at this point, and would have perhaps been most recognizable (if at all) from the short-lived "Golden Girls" spin-off "The Golden Palace." Mouse is a wildcard, well-dressed with a bowler hat cocked to the side and at least two pistols on him at all times.
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