Five years before The Silence of the Lambs, there was writer-director Michael Mann’s pioneering Thomas Harris adaptation Manhunter, now on re-release in a director’s “final cut” for its 40th anniversary. It was his version of Harris’s 1981 novel Red Dragon, a movie which features Dr Hannibal Lecter (here spelt Lecktor) in a relatively minor part, and played in a much more coolly matter-of-fact and downbeat way by Brian Cox, who is first discovered in his cell lying down with his back to the camera. It has long been a haughty, hipster film-bro affectation to claim that Cox is better in the role than Anthony Hopkins. (Lecktor’s early acoustic stuff was great, you see, before he went electric as Lecter.) I think that’s a bit obtuse, for all that Cox is of course very good.
Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs is the definitive version: face it. But I will concede that Cox is more interesting than Hopkins by the time the latter came to make the 2002 adaptation of Red Dragon, at which stage the franchise had become a bit tired. Manhunter itself is a very interesting and watchable movie, but feels a little unevolved compared to Jonathan Demme’s masterly guignol spectacle, although Demme clearly inhaled Mann’s excitement at jets, ’copters and military hardware deployed at speed to bring down just one man.
As in Lambs, the idea is that Dr Lecktor has to be creepily consulted in prison by a law enforcement officer who needs his help bringing down another serial killer, in this case the Tooth Fairy. (Unlike that monster or Lambs’ Buffalo Bill, Lecktor himself does not suffer the vulgar indignity of a nickname, and is always respectfully addressed by his name and academic title.) But there is an interestingly hostile charge in the fact that the person coming to see Lecktor is not a demurely polite young woman, but the guy who actually brought him down in the first place: careworn but brilliantly intuitive FBI profiler Will Graham (William Petersen). The cold dislike in Cox’s face, and his subsequent evil plan, is a marvel. After the trauma and burnout of tracking down Lecktor, Graham has been persuaded back on to the job by FBI chief Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina), desperate for his expert help; this has obvious implications for what no one in 1986 called Graham’s “mental health”.
Graham is brilliant at the job because he can think his way into the serial killer’s twisted mind, and doing this all over again could send him over the edge. Right now, he has a very 80s-looking luxury sunkissed beachfront home in Florida in which to spend his retirement. The Tooth Fairy himself is Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan) who has a Frankenstein’s-monster type tendresse with a blind co-worker called Reba, played by Joan Allen.
It is with her that the film has the strange and rather amazing, if preposterous, scene; somehow Dollarhyde has connections at the zoo which lets him get Reba in behind the scenes to stroke a sedated tiger in one of the most startling “first date” scenes in cinema. The film also features an obnoxious tabloid journalist, Freddy Lounds (Stephen Lang), whose terrible fate at the hands of the Tooth Fairy is pretty plain from the outset: we see how creepy loser Lounds in his way has something in common with serial killers: pathetic, inadequate and predatory, projecting his failings into compulsive behaviour, but evidently without the satanic glamour and imagination of the alpha-male psycho murderers. Manhunter is a brash, queasy, bold thriller; yet for me, it is a curtain-raiser for the main event.
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