Color of Night

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. As a measure of the difference between the two, The Stunt Man had three Academy Award nominations, while this film received a 1994 Golden Raspberry Award. To its credit, the film also won a Golden Globe nomination in the category Best Original Song — Motion Picture for its haunting theme song "The Color of the Night", performed by Lauren Christy.

Since its release in home video market it has gained a status as a cult film, and it did very well in the home video market; it was even a top-five renter

Maxim magazine had also named this film's sex scenes as the Hottest Movie Sex Scene ever.

Plot summary

The plot of the film is clearly influenced by the movies of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly Vertigo.

Bill Capa (Bruce Willis) is a psychoanalyst who becomes rather disturbed himself when an angry patient holds him at gunpoint before committing suicide by jumping from his office window high in a building (compare that to the fall at the beginning of Vertigo which precipitates the phobia in the James Stewart character).

The sight of the bloody body of his patient, clad in a bright green dress, causes Capa to suffer, bizarrely, from stress-induced color blindness. The title refers to the fact that he sees only shades of gray.

To restart his hectic life, Capa travels to Los Angeles, California, to stay with a friend, fellow therapist Dr. Bob Moore. When Moore is murdered Capa is plunged into the mystery of his friend's death. Moore would gather his patients every Monday for a group discussion of their problems and police detective Lt. Hector Martinez suspects one of them of being the killer.

Capa also conducts an affair with Rose (Jane March), a mysterious girl who comes and goes without warning into his life. As their relationships progress, Capa learns of his patients' past and obsessions:

• Clark suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder and insists on cleanliness and counting things; he beat up his wife;
• Sondra (Lesley Ann Warren) has had many affairs and is a kleptomaniac; she stabbed her father with a knife and fork and one of her husbands died of unnatural causes;
• Buck is an unsociable ex-cop; his wife and daughter were brutally murdered and the case is unsolved;
• Casey is the arrogant son of a wealthy man and paints sado-masochist paintings; he burnt down his father's house;
• Richie is a sixteen-year-old with a stutter and a gender identity problem, wanting to be a woman rather than a man; he has a record for drugs.

Then, one of the patients turns up dead, and Capa himself is the subject of several attempts on his life. He soon discovers that all his patients have been involved with Rose and this leads to a twist ending...

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, and the many nude scenes made by the two main actors, including 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. The R-rated "Director's Cut" version was released in US on DVD in 1999; however, this version was still 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 US DVD.

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 remarks 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 US 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; bits that 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 available in the world.