Carl Franklin makes crime thrillers worth caring about by giving awkward, proud people time to become familiar. We rate his patient handling of actors highly, though One False Move sometimes presses the violence too hard.
Fi1m perspective
In One False Move (1992), three criminals are heading towards a small Arkansas town, and ordinary scenes there become uneasy before they arrive. Carl Franklin lets us get to know the people who will have to face them. We rate him highly for that patience: he makes a crime story more worrying by giving its people something beyond a place in the plot. Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson’s screenplay supplies the awkwardness and pride, and Franklin gives both room to register.
Bill Paxton and Cynda Williams provide much of the warmth that makes the threat matter. Williams’s Fantasia gives the criminal trio an emotional weight that menace alone could not supply. Franklin pays attention to racial and sexual inequality through how these people behave and how readily we excuse them. Nobody has to stop the pursuit to deliver a lecture.
After films for Roger Corman, One False Move was the breakthrough, followed by the studio noir Devil in a Blue Dress (1995). Franklin wrote and directed that Walter Mosley adaptation, with Denzel Washington as its Black protagonist in 1940s Los Angeles. The attention to race belongs naturally in his crime stories. One True Thing (1998), with Meryl Streep, took him outside thrillers. Out of Time (2003) reunited him with Washington for a Florida thriller about a compromised lawman.
The clean visual style and carefully arranged movement suit a director interested in what actors can tell us. In One False Move, though, he sometimes insists too hard on the menace. We were horrified by the opening violence; its brutality made the subsequent pursuit impossible to settle into comfortably. The danger is clear, but the emphasis risks overwhelming the quieter scenes we value most.
Since the 2010s, he has directed primarily for television, including episodes of The Pacific, House of Cards and Mindhunter. Those credits should discourage us from treating the features as the whole career. Start with One False Move, but take the opening’s brutality seriously.
Biography
Carl Franklin is an American film and television director, screenwriter and former actor. Born in Richmond, California, he studied at the University of California, Berkeley before working as a television actor in the 1970s and 1980s, with regular roles including on The A-Team. He later trained at the AFI Conservatory, graduating with an MFA in directing in 1986.
Franklin made his feature directorial debut with the 1992 crime thriller One False Move, which earned him the Independent Spirit Award for Best Director and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association New Generation Award. He went on to direct Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) and Out of Time (2003), and has directed episodes of series including House of Cards, Mindhunter, The Pacific and 13 Reasons Why.
