Los Angeles, 1916: Photographer Bill Ogden has opened a portrait studio in the seedy world of early Hollywood, where he is joined by his granddaughter, Flavia – a woman in need of a fresh start after bludgeoning her abusive husband to death in Wichita. Though his business is mainly legit, Bill finds himself brushing up against the "blue movie" porn industry growing in the shadows of the motion picture mainstream. When a series of grisly murders take place across the city, Bill and his granddaughter are pulled into events as tricky and tangled as anything this side of The Big Sleep.
By turns raunchy, hard-boiled and comical, with a faint beam of humane sentiment peeping through the darkness ... Punctuated by brutality and peppered with louche patois, The Devil Raises His Own is a guilty pleasure if ever there was one.
The roster of hangers-on is obviously headed for a day of reckoning, but when it finally arrives in a series of violent confrontations, it can’t help seeming anticlimactic. Less compelling as a story than as a richly teeming historical canvas.
