'Color of Night'

Publish date: 2024-08-08
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‘Color of Night’

By Desson Howe
Washington Post Staff Writer
August 19, 1994
 


Director:
Richard Rush
Cast:
Bruce Willis;
Jane March;
Ruben Blades;
Lesley Ann Warren;
Scott Bakula;
Brad Dourif;
Kevin J. O'Connor;
Lance Henriksen
R
graphic nudity, profanity and violence

"Color of Night," starring Bruce Willis and Jane March, is a catcaller's good time, a clunker ripe for hecklers and oglers. An increasingly ridiculous hybrid of sexy romance, murder mystery and psychological mumbo jumbo, it's another bad spin on Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," with plummetings from high-up places, repressed guilt and love for a mysterious woman. But its watchability is more attributable to comic relief from Ruben Blades, Lesley Ann Warren and others than the ballyhooed steam between Willis and March.

New York psychologist Willis is haunted by a female patient he inadvertently caused to leap from his lofty Manhattan office window. All he did was tell her, "Look in the mirror. What do you see?" But she became sidewalk meat and he became tormented. Pitching his practice, Willis retreats to California to lick his wounds at the incredibly fabulous home of shrink-pal Scott Bakula. Willis immediately becomes acquainted with Bakula's Monday group of personality-disordered patients, which includes Brad Dourif, an obsessive-compulsive businessman who can't stand smells and ashtrays; Warren, a blonde cuckoo who loves sex; Kevin J. O'Connor, a repressed, cynical artist; and Lance Henriksen, a grim-faced patient trying to cope with a slaughtered wife and child.

When Bakula is brutally stabbed to death (and with a spread like that, you just don't feel sorry for the guy), Willis is asked by the patients--and detective Blades--to take over the sessions. The cop suspects the killer is one of the patients and wants Willis (still ensconced at Bakula's house) to do some investigating.

An auto fender-bender later, Willis meets March, an unemployed actress with no insurance or underwear. When she knocks at his door the next day, it's love at first montage, full of dissolving images, goofy mood music and underwater acrobatics. March (whose name sounds like a novel by one of the Bronte sisters) gamely shows that nakedness isn't necessarily something to keep to yourself--especially if a Hollywood film crew is waiting. Luckily, Willis does not completely share this view. There is no frontal nudity on his part--unless I looked away at the wrong moment or didn't squint enough.

"Color of Night" survives primarily on its humorous performances. As the cynical, wisecracking detective, Blades is the best of all. Searching Bakula's house immediately after the murder, he becomes fascinated with the wooden, sculpted face that serves as Bakula's headboard. "Check the [expletive] bed," he says. "Everybody's having fun but me."

And at the Monday session, Dourif declares that a recent relationship is over because of his ex-partner's slovenly habits, including chewing gum in the ashtrays, discarded cotton balls and coagulated grease in frying pans. "I made a list," he says. "There were 22 items I couldn't take."

After Willis hits it off with March, things become too convoluted to explain, let alone give away.

You can find out for yourself if March (the schoolgirl in Jean-Jacques Annaud's "The Lover") really is the "eighth wonder of the world," as director Richard Rush puts it in press material for this film or whether the mystery marauder constantly trying to run Willis down is after Willis because of his connections to the case or his intention to make "Die Hard 3" after this.

COLOR OF NIGHT (R) -- Contains graphic nudity, profanity and violence.

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