In a loving and lush recreation of black Los Angles of that era by set designer Gary Frutkoff, this film noir starts. Think of any of the Raymond Chandler mysteries. Easy owns a home in a black middle class suburb of LA that Frutkoff has created with wide streets, tall cool palm trees, and green lawns. Although Easy has a nice house and a long, new Pontiac, all is not easy for him as he has just lost the lucrative job in the aircraft industry that he migrated years ago from Texas to get. He was fired because of the color of his skin.
Racism interlaces the story as a subtext, but it is a mystery more than a morality play.
DeWitt says that the mayor has hire him to find her. He says that Easy could be more inconspicuous in black nightclubs than he would be. Soon however people start getting killed and the police want to pin the murders on Easy. The mystery is who is doing it and why. I thought the script by the director Carl Franklin, based on the novel of the same name by Walter Mosely, was too much of a period and mood piece and too little of a mystery.