THE COLOR OF NIGHT

THE COLOR OF NIGHT (Directed by Richard Rush. Starring Bruce Willis, Jane March, Ruben Blades, Lesley Ann Warren, Scott Bakula, Lance Henriksen)

“I cannot feel the pain I know I’m supposed to be feeling,” says a trembling Bruce Willis in The Color Of Night. Well I’m sure he will when he’s through reading all his reviews. In a fortnight which sees Bruce perfectly cast as a ‘has been’ boxer on the scam in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (see review) he is hopelessly miscast here as a, wait for it, psychologist.

Can you imagine going into analysis with Bruce? He’s such a blue collar actor, it is easier to picture him slapping his patients around and telling them to pull themselves together than discussing a Freudian analysis of their dreams. He’s the kind of guy who’d call someone suffering from an Oedipus complex a motherfucker. And you’d sit through the whole session half-expecting a gang of terrorists to burst in and take over the office at any moment. He’s the wrong guy in the wrong profession in the wrong film.

After one of Bruce’s patients commits suicide by throwing herself out of his high rise office in the middle of a session (I know how she feels) he becomes blind to the colour red, which loosely explains the film’s title but little else, since it has absolutely nothing to do with the frankly ludicrous plot. Bruce goes to stay with friendly psychologist Scott Bakula, the sensitive star of TV’s Quantum Leap, much more credible discussing anal obsession than Bruce, who looks like he’d hit you if you mentioned your bottom. But before you can say “the doctor will see you now,” Scott is murdered by someone in his group therapy session. It’s a hazardous profession, I guess.

There is, in fact, a splendid supporting cast of actors keen to display their neurotic ticks as the patients, and a nice sub text of black comedy (Brad Dourif as the anal compulsive wants to know exactly how many times the doctor was stabbed) but the plot is awkwardly put together, and the humour sits uneasily with Bruce’s earnest attempts to play doctor (which he does in full kit off, steamy, underwater clinches with Jane March playing nurse). This is a Hitchcockian thriller with real cock in it, but somehow the eroticism is even worse than the miscasting. Lets face it, not only is Bruce the man you’d least like to be in analysis with, he ain’t exactly the sexiest man on earth either. I mean, do you really want to pay to see him dangle his flaccid willy in your face? Now, that could really lead to Freudian nightmares.