Zach Vasquez
In late February of 2020, I caught a double feature of 1974 buddy-cop classics Freebie and the Bean and Busting at Hollywood’s New Beverly Cinemas. That screening has since taken on special meaning for me because Freebie director Richard Rush was in attendance. He sat directly behind me, so I got to meet him and tell him how much I loved his 1980 masterpiece The Stuntman. More than that, I was happy that Rush got to experience a packed audience go absolutely nuts for his brilliantly profane action-comedy classic.
While there’s no way for me to know this for sure, I think it’s very likely this was the last movie Rush saw in a theater, since the COVID pandemic shut everything down only a couple of weeks later and a little over a year after that, Rush–who was not in the best health when I met him—would pass away at the age of 91. (This was the same screening where I watched Elliot Gould, also in attendance, tell some weirdo who was bothering him to “Watch your mouth motherfucker!” But that’s a story for a different occasion.)
Rush, who got his start directing propaganda films for the Air Force during the Korean War, transitioned first to television and then exploitation flicks for American International Pictures. He only ever directed four studio films. The first two—the counterculture campus comedy Getting Straight (1970) and the aforementioned Freebie and the Bean—were both hits, while his troubled passion project, The Stunt Man, ended up garnering huge critical praise and nabbing several Oscar nominations. Unfortunately, Rush’s career as a studio director stalled out after that, and it would take another 14 years for him to direct what would end up being his final picture, 1994’s Color of Night.
Bruce Willis stars as Bill Capa, a New York-based psychologist who suffers his own breakdown—as well as the sudden onset of colorblindness—after one of his patients flings herself out of his high-rise office window during a session. Taking a much needed break, Capa moves to Los Angeles to crash at the swank pad of fellow shrink and best friend/rival Bob Moore (Scott Bakula). Moore confides that he’s been receiving disturbing threats from an anonymous figure who he believes to be one of the patients in his Monday night group therapy session (said patients are played by a murderer’s row of character actors: Lance Henricksen, Brad Douriff, Leslie Anne Warren, Kevin J. O’Connor).
Moore asks Capa to sit in on a session in order to give his impression of the patients/suspects, only to wind up brutally stabbed to death in his office a few nights later. Capa ends up taking over the group, making himself a target for both the killer and an antagonistic police detective (Ruben Blades, giving the most over-the-top performance in a film full of pole-vaulters) who thinks he may be the culprit. As if that weren’t enough to keep him busy, Capa also finds himself involved in a steamy love affair with a mysterious young actress (Jane March) who we soon discover has a secret connection to the group.
As an erotic thriller, Color of Night absolutely does not work. The answer to the central murder mystery is extremely obvious from the start (thanks, in large part, to some bad prosthetics), while the sex scenes are less prevalent than you’d think going in. They’re also nothing special, more reminiscent of a Skinemax flick than, say, those shot by masters of the genre like Adrian Lyne or Paul Verhoven.
However, the film makes up for this in other ways. Color of Night is, if not quite a visual feast, a visual smorgasbord, filled to the brim with all manner of camera tricks—split diopter shots, extreme closeups, Dutch angles, rack focuses (which Rush takes credit for refining, if not outright inventing,alongside frequent collaborator Laszlo Kovacs)—and lighting effects, as well as near countless examples of a Russian doll framing techniques. All of this combines to create a funhouse mirror atmosphere that recalls Hitchcock and De Palma at their most baroque.
The references to those directors extend beyond the cinematography. The script (from Matthew Chapman and future A-lister Billy Ray) is loaded with the staples of their work: Fruedian psychology, a prurient interest in disorders/phobias (in this case, vertigo and claustrophobia swapped out for colorblindness) and gender dysmorphia (needless to say, the film’s depiction does not pass muster today), and a general air of voyeurism.
However, Rush distinguishes his film by imbuing it with his signature sense of slapstick anarchism. Watching a Rush film, one never knows what to expect from scene-to-scene: an intellectually stimulating exchange of dialog or moment of high melodrama is likely to veer into Looney Tunes territory at any moment. (Tonally, the director whose style is most comparable to Rush’s is, surprisingly, Polish arthouse auteur Andzrej Zulawski.)
Audiences in the ‘70s had more tolerance for the carnivalesque than those of the ‘90s, so it should come as no surprise that Color of Night bombed at the American box office (it fared better overseas). When it debuted in the summer of ‘94, it came already mired in controversy thanks to both a bitter ratings battle with the MPAA, as well as a very public fight between Rush and producers over final cut, with Rush only accepting a compromise after suffering a heart attack. At the time, most of the headlines focused on a rumored shot of Bruce Willis’s penis in one of the film’s sex scenes. This ended up getting snipped from the theatrical version—the same which is currently available to stream—but was included in the unrated director’s cut.
While the possibility of seeing Bruno hang dong wasn’t enough to put asses into seats during the film’s theatrical run, it did prove a hit on home video, becoming one of the top 20 most rented VHS titles of the following year. The notoriety surrounding it—Color of Night “won” the Golden Raspberry for Worst Film of 1994—all but guaranteed it would go on to enjoy status as a campy cult classic, especially after its notoriety was further bolstered by a 2000 Maxim magazine piece that named it Best Sex Scenes in Movie History—award Rush kept proudly on display in his home’s bathroom. (It helps too that a Color of Night can also be considered an American giallo, ensuring genre hounds will seek it out.)
In the decades since, the film has become somewhat forgotten, as is probably to be expected (it’s not like The Razzies or Maxim hold much cultural relevance these days, if they ever did). However, there’s been a renewed interest in erotic thrillers over the last couple of years, thanks in large part to the efforts of tastemakers like The Criterion Channel (currently hosting the movie in their “Erotic Thrillers” collection) and Karina Longworth, who’s dedicated two seasons of her popular podcast You Must Remember This to the genre, and partly as a response to the shameful lack of sex in movies today.
As a new generation of movie lovers discover the pleasures of this disreputable category of film, it seems inevitable that they’ll make their way to Color of Night. While it doesn’t necessarily deserve any critical reappraisal, it is—like all of Rush’s films—simply too excessive, too bizarre, and too unique to overlook.
“Color of Night” is streaming on the Criterion Channel as part of their “Erotic Thrillers” program.
