I just..

[Laurie]

Liz, rent Manhunter(the original Red Dragon), a 1986 film by Michael Mann (Miami Vice), starring William Peterson of CSI fame. I have not seen Red Dragon yet but I don't see how it could be any better than the original.

[Wombat]

The reviews I read said that Manhunter was a much worse movie, and that Red Dragon was closer to the book?

Hopefully I'll get around to seeing it, maybe. Silence was awesome, but Hannibal only had one or two redeeming moments, and the rest of the movie was blah.

[Laurie]

Well, I went looking for reviews of both movies. Eberts gave it 4 1/2 stars so I quit there on Red Dragon and started on Manhunter. It is very obvious this is one you either love or feel ambivalent about. Quite a few hated the soundtrack, I loved it, go figure. So I will only post one of the favourable reviews and leave it at that.

WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW








We begin the movie in the mind of a murderer. Looking through the lens of a restless, hand-held POV camera, we climb a set of dark stairs in what looks like a typical suburban house. A flashlight beam illumines discarded socks, a stuffed animal. Then, we’re in a bedroom, the flashlight shining on the face of a sleeping woman. Slowly, gradually she rises from the fuzzy abyss of sleep. She holds a hand to her face in confusion, then she realizes what’s going on—there’s someone in the room with her!—and she sits up in bed, looking straight at the camera, her face widening in fright.

—Cut to the opening credits flashing on a dark screen and a neon-green word: Manhunter.

Welcome to what some people might call Hannibal, the First Course. And, yes, the comparisons are inevitable between Michael Mann’s 1986 Manhunter, the first screen appearance of Dr. Hannibal Lektor, and the bigger, gaudier, more popular The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. There is a legion of fans who will vow ’til death do them part that Manhunter is the supreme treatment of Thomas Harris’ lick-the-chops anti-hero. They will say, with a Lecterish hiss, that Mann’s film is the first and best and that the cannibal later springing from the talents of Anthony Hopkins, Jonathan Demme, Ridley Scott, et al is nothing more than second helpings of leftovers. I’m going to take the easy way out of the fight and say that I enjoyed both Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs in equal, but different, measures. (I’m waiting to see Scott’s Hannibal until after I have my stomach surgically lined with cast iron.)

For those of you who don’t really have a clue* about the characters or movies I’ve been talking about, I suggest you take a break from this review and go read Harris’ novels Red Dragon (the basis for Manhunter) and The Silence of the Lambs…but whatever you do, stay far, far away from the Hannibal novel.

*Oh, and don’t forget to send us that change-of-address card to that cave you’ve been living in.

The Oscar-winning Lambs is a carnival ride of suspense, red herrings and the best kind of hammy acting. Its horror works on you in the same way that coming suddenly across a mangled car wreck might—you don’t want to watch and you dread what’s coming next…but you can’t turn away. You’re hypnotized.

By contrast to Lambs’ bright, busy fright, murder-and-mayhem is cooler and more pensive in the hands of Mann (the cool, pensive director of great films like Thief, Heat and The Insider). Some of this is courtesy of Dante Spinotti’s masterful cinematography that bathes night scenes in the kind of blue normally reserved for Aqua Velva bottles. The blue filter lends a sterility to the sets and characters that perhaps is meant to be a reflection of the inside of the psychopath’s mind. Spinotti also includes splashes of green, which can symbolize either death or rejuvenation, depending on the context. While there’s always the hope and possibility of life, we all know that Harris and his Hannibal deal primarily in death.

Here, in Manhunter, death stalks every frame, but remains in the wings. Mann cleverly choose to keep most of the gore and violence off-camera, instead planting the suggestion of unspeakable crimes in our imaginations. Compare this to Demme’s Lambs which, like a carnival spook house, relentlessly thrusts grimy, bloodied fingers in our face (how many of us can easily forget Buffalo Bill’s “skin suit”?). One of the most effective uses of this implied violence comes when forensic psychologist Will Graham (William Petersen) returns to the crime scene we saw in that opening shot. Mann duplicates the flashlight-up-the-stairs sequence with chilling déjà vu. Except this time, when Graham enters the bedroom and flicks on the light, we see the gore-streaked bed, carpet and walls. Like Graham, we’re left with nothing but our overheated imaginations. Frankly, it’s nearly unbearable to stand there with Graham and look at that bedroom and its bloody afterdeath.

Manhunter’s plot is a close echo of Lamb’s: obsessed FBI agents on the trail of a serial killer—this time, it’s the “Tooth Fairy” (Tom Noonan). Stymied by crime scenes which leave little clues, Graham, like Clarice Starling in Lambs, turns to Mr. Liver-and-Chianti himself, Dr. Hannibal Lektor (for some reason, exchanging the c and e with a k and o). It’s a pretty safe bet that most moviegoers will automatically equate Anthony Hopkins’ lip-smacking performance in Lambs and/or Hannibal as the be-all, end-all Cannibal-Hannibal performance. Those nice folks have undoubtedly never seen Brian Cox in the role. If Hopkins is a big, brassy symphony, then Cox is a less-showy string quartet. He approaches Hannibal with a quiet menace that slips its cold fingers along your spine just as effectively as a hissing thup-thup-thup from Mr. Hopkins. A British actor who was quite good in The Minus Man, Cox doesn’t get as much screen time as Hopkins, but when he is there, playing mental cat-and-mouse with Graham, you can’t peel your eyes away. You’re hypnotized.

As Graham and his boss, Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina, then in the midst of the TV series Crime Story), track the Tooth Fairy with Sherlock Holmesian precision, Hannibal also plays his mental gymnastics with Graham from where he’s incarcerated in his stark-white padded cell at Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane (in reality, Atlanta’s High Museum of Art). Lektor, Mann seems to be saying, is surrounded by sterility on the outside, while inside…well, I guess we all know what seethes and teems there, don’t we?

As the FBI tightens the noose, we become acquainted with the Tooth Fairy, aka Francis Dolarhyde (a name that just rolls right off your tongue!). We see Dolarhyde going about his daily business, emotionally detached but psychologically dangerous. We watch him attempt a relationship with a blind co-worker (Joan Allen in a very early role). Then, like a car wreck we can’t prevent, we watch helplessly as Dolarhyde skids toward violence.

With his tall, lanky body and pale features, Noonan is captivating in the role of the killer who just wants to love and be loved. Against our better judgment, we find ourselves starting to feel (gasp!) sympathy for this devil.

At the nuclear core of Manhunter’s acting lineup is Petersen in a role that’s clearly echoed in what he does on TV’s C.S.I. these days. I can distinctly remember the first movie of Petersen’s I saw—1987’s Amazing Grace and Chuck. It was a fairly maudlin movie about nuclear war and Little League baseball (don’t ask), but I remember Petersen’s energy sparking up every scene he was in. Though he hasn’t exactly fallen off the Hollywood map in the years since, he’s never been much of an above-the-title marquee name, either. Manhunter is perhaps his finest hour. As the emotionally-tormented Graham, he is like a coiled spring that never gets released. There’s a lot going on under the surface of the detective that we can never really put our finger on—but you can bet that Petersen knows this character inside and out.

However, the real star of Manhunter is Mann’s mood-weaving style. In addition to Spinotti’s blue-green cinematography and the electronic score by Michel Rubini (which seeps in like a low growl from a dog), the director shows his artistry as a skilled composer of shots, most of which are balanced in precise symmetry. Mann also has careful control over the film’s pace which steadily builds the tension. Unlike many other horror movies, there are no moments of release along the way, no cat-jumping-from-the-shadows “gotcha!” tricks. Silence of the Lambs, you’ll recall, had its share of those moments.

There are moments of great beauty in the midst of the horror. I especially liked the scene when Dolarhyde takes his blind co-worker on a “date” to a zoo veterinarian’s office where she’s able to touch a sedated tiger. As she runs her fingers through the striped fur, little does she know that she’s really flirting with the sedated evil of the Tooth Fairy.

Mann’s script is also full of pensive beauty, surprisingly literate and poetic for one of its genre. When he’s thinking about the Tooth Fairy’s latest victim, Graham imagines her rising from the death-bed, her eyes and mouth replaced by a glowing light. He murmurs the phrase, “In the silver mirrors of your eyes…” Words and images that reflect just how good a movie about murder can be.


DVDetails
As I said, Manhunter has an army of fans. And, after Anchor Bay released a limited edition package featuring a “director’s cut,” I’m sure most of them were ready to go into battle against the distributor.

I’m going to make this very simple for you: Do NOT bother watching the so-called director’s cut. The print-to-disc transfer is so abysmally bad that Spinotti’s gorgeous cinematography is reduced to fuzzy, bleeding colors. It’s like getting a dupe of a dupe from your third cousin who taped it off HBO one night when he was particularly drunk. It’s that bad…maybe even worse. There are a few extra minutes of footage, some of it worthwhile (an exchange between Graham and the director of the mental hospital which adds to our understanding of the Lektor-Graham relationship) and some of it needless (a couple of minutes added to the front of the FBI briefing)—but none of it worth enduring two hours of grainy imperfection. Oh, and don’t bother looking for a director’s commentary—for some reason, Mann hasn’t recorded one.

[Dr Mordrid]

I really liked Manhunter, but could make a place in my DVD library (which I'm now reconstituting because of a breakin).

Dr. Mordrid