3 out of 5

Directed by: Richard Rush

During my fledgling Bruce Willis fandom, I don’t know how exactly I ‘learned’ that Color of Night was bad.  It came out a couple of years before my VHS rental of Die Hard 3 done taught me that Bruce was The Man, so I probably wasn’t paying much attention, but in that cultural absorption way in which we come to judge things we otherwise have no exposure to, I looked upon the ‘Color of Night’ gap in my growing Bruce movie collection with a sigh, knowing I’d have to watch this ‘bad’ movie at some point.

And yes: Color of Night, from a certain perspective, is bad, though not really as much as my pre-bias first (and thereafter, rare) viewing suggested it was.  It’s got shoe-horned in Bruce moments; it reeks of the erotic thriller fare of the era, but without much to justify its eroticism or thrills.  But it’s definitely not a ‘so bad it’s good’ flick either, instead hovering – for real – on the edge of great, once you factor in director Richard Rush’s almost vaudevillian, overblown style and the very hefty giallo nods peppered into its bloodier moments.  It also helps to binge a lot of recent Bruce fare, in which he truly no longer acts, so much as reads his lines; his performance in CoN is comparatively stunning, and now years separated from framing him as the go-to reluctant action star in my mind, and just seeing him as an actor, some of scenes are very well done, helped out by a really solid supporting cast.

To be clear: watched for its plot, Color of Night is a total wash.  None of the ‘twists’ are convincing – in fact, they’re rather laughably in your face – and all of its characters’ actions are either reactionary for plot purposes, or contrived for the same reasons.  But watched as a self-aware piece of in-your-face sensationalism, Rush and DP Dietrich Lohmann lay down some supremely staged and shot sequences, making much use of odd perspectives and reflections and some deliciously giallo-esque angles and colors and shot styles.  The softcore sex stuff is a true relic, and it’s okay for what it is, more amusing for the way Bruce and actress Jane March just get to it – then pause to eat, then get back to it, then later, after multitudes of steamy Hollywood thrusting over several days, Bruce realizes he never asked his partner’s last name – but it’s also difficult contextualizing it in my brain with way-after-the-fact knowledge of March’s discomfort with the scenes, and the general assumption that actresses just had to ‘go with it’ to get their name on the screen…

There’s also the other-wordly set piece feeling to the LA in which CoN exists; pinks and blues and bright ol’ red light up excellently realized production pieces; each area, even if it’s a random eatery or cop office, feels legit within the heightened sensibility of the movie, making it a pretty enthralling viewing for most of its 2 hour plus runtime.

But then there’s that mystery, and then there’s the lack of character motivations.  While a lot of what I’m praising above – the sort of the over-the-top approach – feels of a like mind with, say, Stunt Man, and is believed to be purposeful, the parts that don’t feel purposeful are hard to praise at the same time.  If the thing was just an overall mess, or if it was wholly aware of itself, that might push it (positively) over the line, but because one can sense an undercurrent of ignorance while some amusing, willful things are happening at the same time, it hobbles the movie; you feel bad for it as you start to laugh at it and not with it.  The character motivations are rather a similar complaint, with Bruce and the attendees in the therapy group he leads all coming off as (again, with context of the flick) rather well realized people, but then Jane March’s character and a singular character in the same group are clearly just there to be there.  As Ebert notes in his wonderful review of the flick, quoting his Law of Economy of Characters rule: “Either (March) is there simply to give him a partner in the sex scenes, or she is somehow involved with the mystery surrounding the murder,” and the same applies to the other character I’ve mentioned.  Dialogue (outside of the sex talk…) attributed to either one of these roles is just explicit fodder for “see, we mentioned it!” type callbacks.

In Color of Night, therapist Bruce Willis berates a client into suicide, which causes him to take a break to LA, to recuperate in the presence of his pal Scott Bakula, also a therapist.  That recuperation goes on hold when Bakula is killed, and the patients in his therapy group are all suspected.  Willis takes over for Scott, initially out of interest in the group but soon following up on suspicions of his own.  Meanwhile, March shows up and takes off her dress (a shallow, but unfortunately accurate representation of her role…), and Bruce also can’t see the color red, which somehow ties into the title of the movie, I guess.

The flick ends with a bloody, supposedly emotional showdown that’s punctuated by a character making a joke over a freeze frame.  It’s that kinda thing.

I had planned to review the theatrical versus the director’s cut separately, but there are so many scattered cuts throughout – not extra scenes, just extended ones – that it’s hard to fully justify a comparison.  That said, the director’s cut is a better film, allowing scenes to drift on a bit longer, which matches the kind of dreamlike logic of the movie.  The theatrical cut minuses this, making it a bit choppier and sloppier and losing Rush’s inherent scene rhythm.  And sure, there’s more peen in the unrated.

Bluray notes, 2019 Kino Lorber edition: I don’t know for sure if this was released on blu-ray before, but the KL transfer is definitely a step up from the DVD copy I originally had, sharper – especially the audio- without losing the grain that gives the film its erotic noir tint.  The commentaries sound like they’re recent (maybe Rush’s is from 2015, but Chapman mentions Weinstein in reference to recent events) – so I assume they’re new.  Richard Rush’s commentary on the director’s cut is slooow and he sounds pretty old and occasionally out of it (the moderator does a good job of questioning him, without being insulting, on some odder statements he makes), but there’s still a lot of fascinating chatter around the decisions he made, and Bruce’s set behavior.  The most interesting – or maybe damning – takeaway is that he claims test audiences were ‘totally fooled’ by the twist, which even the moderator has a hard time buying.  Screenwriter Matthew Chapman’s commentary, on the theatrical cut, is equally interesting for its honesty, both on topic – talking about his dislike of what happened to his original script – and off – when he and the moderator start talking about erotic and transgressive cinema in general.