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Color of Night
Poster for Color of Night.
Directed by	Richard Rush
Produced by	Buzz Feitshans David Matalon
Written by	Story: Billy Ray Screenplay: Billy Ray Matthew Chapman
Starring	Bruce Willis Jane March Ruben Blades Lesley Ann Warren Scott Bakula
Music by	Dominic Frontiere
Distributed by	Hollywood Pictures (USA) Cinergi Pictures (foreign markets)
Release date(s)	August 19, 1994
Running time	121 min Director's Cut: 140 min
Language	English

Color of Night is a 1994 erotic mystery thriller film starring Bruce Willis and Jane March, made by Cinergi Pictures and released in the United States by Hollywood Pictures.

It is one of two well-known works by director Richard Rush, the other being The Stunt Man 14 years before. As a measure of the difference between the two, The Stunt Man had three Academy Award nominations, whereas this film received a 1994 Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture.

To its credit, Color of Night did win a Golden Globe nomination in the category Best Original Song — Motion Picture for its theme song "The Color of the Night," performed by Lauren Christy.

It flopped at the box office but did well in the home video market, becoming a top-five renter.^[1]

Maxim magazine singled it out as having the Best Sex Scenes in film history. ^[2]

Plot summary

Bill Capa is a New York City psychoanalyst who becomes disturbed himself when a patient holds him at gunpoint before committing suicide by jumping from his high-rise building's office window. The sight of the bloody body of his patient clad in a bright green dress causes Capa to suffer from psychosomatic color blindness.

To restart his life, Capa travels to Los Angeles to stay with a friend, fellow therapist and best-selling author Dr. Bob Moore, who invites him to sit in on a group patient session. But one night Moore is violently murdered in the office and Capa is plunged into the mystery of his friend's death.

Moore would gather his patients every Monday for a discussion of their problems and police detective Lt. Hector Martinez considers them, and Capa, suspects in the murder.

Capa continues to live in Moore's house and begins a torrid affair with Rose, a mysterious girl who comes and goes without warning into his life. As relationships develop, Capa takes over Moore's patients and learns of their pasts and obsessions:

• Clark suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder and insists on cleanliness and counting things. This led him to beat up his wife.
• Sondra Dorio is a nymphomaniac and kleptomaniac. She stabbed her father with a knife and fork and one of her husbands died of unnatural causes.
• Buck is an anti-social, possibly suicidal, ex-cop. The murder of his wife and daughter remains unsolved.
• Casey Heinz is the arrogant son of a wealthy man. He paints sado-masochist works of art and once burned down his father's house.
• Richie is a 16-year-old with a stutter and a gender identity problem. He wants to be a woman and has a history of drug use.

Soon, one of these patients is violently murdered and Capa himself becomes the target of several attempts on his life. He also discovers that all but one of his patients has been romantically involved with the exotic Rose.

This leads to a twist ending: "Richie" is really Rose, and the murders have been committed by her deranged brother Dale. They actually had a brother called Richie who was sexually molested by a child psychiatrist named Niedelmeyer. Richie committed suicide and, unable to come to terms with the fact that he failed to protect him, Dale forced Rose to play the part of their brother. Over time, she actually became "Richie" but when she was forced into therapy as a result of being arrested for drug possession, Rose started to re-emerge and, under other identities, started relationships with other members of the group. Dale proceeded to kill them, fearing that they would soon link Rose to "Richie".

When Capa confronts Rose and Dale over this, Dale tries to kill him but is killed by Rose. Horrified by this, she tries to commit suicide but Capa is able to stop her, bookending the story with two suicide attempts — one at the beginning, resulting in Capa's loss of color vision, and one at the end, thwarted and resulting in him regaining it.

Controversy

Color of Night received a certain degree of notoriety for the sex scenes between Willis and Jane March, which were somewhat graphic for a mainstream movie: the many nude scenes made by the two main actors included a full-frontal by Willis.

This was the second film in which March appeared in explicit sex scenes (the first being The Lover).

Cutting

The film briefly received an NC-17 rating before Rush edited it sufficiently to receive an R. His "Director's Cut" version was released in US on DVD in 1999; however, this version was not totally uncut.

According to Kevin S. Sandler's book The Naked Truth: Why Hollywood Doesn't Make X-Rated Movies, Disney (owners of Hollywood Pictures) had a policy not to release any unrated movies on home video market, so they didn't release the totally uncut version of Color of Night on DVD.

The European version of Color of Night has very few extra scenes, but it also leaves out some scenes that are on the DVD in the U.S.

A good example is when Willis and March first make love: in the version shown on British television, Rose takes off her red dress before she and Capa drop into the pool; in the DVD the dress does not come off until they are in the pool.

Again, in the version shown on British TV, the police are shown in Casey's loft after Capa has found his body. The examiner gives Capa and Martinez a preliminary report, doubting Capa's observation that a woman could have committed the murder. On the DVD, this scene is replaced by Sondra and Rose having a night out, watching a couple making love in another house and coming close to consummating their own passion for each other.

The U.S. version also has some meetings between Capa and Martinez's partner Detective Anderson (Eriq La Salle) and mentions Martinez's affair with Buck's late wife; these bits are left out of the UK version.

Many various differences are shown in the alternative versions section of the imdb entry on the film.

No totally uncut version of Color of Night is yet available.

Cast

• Bruce Willis as Dr. Bill Capa
• Jane March as Rose/Richie
• Ruben Blades as Det. Hector Martinez
• Lesley Ann Warren as Sondra Dorio
• Brad Dourif as Clark
• Lance Henriksen as Buck
• Kevin J. O'Connor as Casey Heinz
• Scott Bakula as Dr. Bob Moore
• Eriq La Salle as Det. Anderson
• Andrew Lowery as Dale Dexter

Reaction

Referring to the film as "memorably bizarre," Janet Maslin in her August 19, 1994 New York Times review wrote: "The enthusiastically nutty Color of Night has the single-mindedness of a bad dream and about as much reliance on everyday logic." She also cited the revelation of the murderer, "whose disguise won't fool anyone, anywhere."

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote: "I was, frankly, stupefied. To call it absurd would be missing the point, since any shred of credibility was obviously the first thing thrown overboard. It's so lurid in its melodrama and so goofy in its plotting that with just a bit more trouble, it could have been a comedy."

References

External links

• Color of Night at the Internet Movie Database
• Color of Night at Rotten Tomatoes