I’m playing catch up because I’ve been under the weather and have only been doing the bare minimum to keep Story-Power and Classic Cinema going.
I thought you might enjoy seeing episode 23, Mississippi Masala (1991). It was the last Classic Cinema With the Sage Sisters installment of 2025 and episode 25, Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) the first installment of 2026. Both of these movies are examples of the Washington’s immense talent and a shadowing of the star he has become.
Mississippi Masala is about an ethnic Indian family who were expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972. The tragedy for the family is that they were all born in Uganda and had prospered there. 17 years later they find themselves living in Mississippi in greatly reduced circumstances. Mina, Jay and Kinnu’s daughter is now a young woman and has grown up much more independent than the other young people of the Indian community to which she belongs. She meets, Demetrius after a small car accident. He owns a carpet cleaning business and most of his clients are the local Indian hotel owners. Trouble ensues when Mina and Demetrius begin a romantic relationship. Director Mira Nair, (Zohran Mamdani’s mother) and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala created this movie to be solely about race relations between the Indians and African Americans. Many of the cast and crew are famous Bollywood performers and crew members. As far as I’m concerned it’s a must see movie because of the emotional journeys of the characters.
Devil in a Blue Dress is a very different movie. It takes place in 1948 Los Angeles amid a political scandal, which is what Hitchcock would call the mcguffin of the story. The real focus is on Easy Rawlins, a WW II hero who has just lost his job. When a friend of his introduces him to a white man who offers him a questionable job, Easy finds himself mixed up in murder, blackmail, and the search for a mysterious woman who wears only blue. The movie is based on the first book in a long Easy Rawlins series by Walter Mosley and is what Celeste and I call neo-noir. The movie is atmostpheric taking place mostly at night with Ez as the detective, Jennifer Beals as the supposed femme fatale, moral ambiguity in terms of the job Ez is hired for and dangerous bad guys. It’s also
Sage Woman Chronicles 