Manhunter ***** (1986, William Petersen, Kim Greist, Joan Allen, Brian Cox, Dennis Farina) – Classic Movie Review 136

Michael Mann’s much-admired 1986 thriller film Manhunter is dark, dangerous and scary. Brian Cox plays the jailed cannibal serial killer Hannibal, asked to help FBI agent Will Graham (William Petersen) catch the Tooth Fairy.

In his first appearance in book or movie form, the jailed cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter (here spelled Lecktor) is asked to help the haunted and neurotic FBI agent Will Graham (William Petersen) in his grim mission to catch Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan), a serial killer the press nickname the Tooth Fairy.

A specialist in profiling serial killers to track them down, Graham has recently retired hurt to Florida with his wife and young son. But now he is re-recruited by his old FBI superior Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina) to find some kind of pattern in murders by the currently unknown killer who apparently selects his victims at random and strikes at the full moon.

Graham is the man who nearly lost his life capturing Lecter a while ago, so he thinks visits to the crazy but charismatic movie monster might provide the answers he needs. Or get him into more trouble…

Writing his own script closely based on Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon, director Michael Mann’s much-admired thriller Manhunter is dark, dangerous and scary. It has an eerie, decadent atmosphere of evil and is sometimes nasty but almost never actually violent. Manhunter is notable for its visual style, so it is fascinating that it could hardly look more different from its 1991 sequel, The Silence of the Lambs, despite weirdly sharing the same cinematographer in Dante Spinotti.

Spinotti composes his visuals in flashily stylish, often stylised images, which are accompanied by a thumping rock score (Michael Rubini, The Reds) that often make it look like an extended Eighties pop video. This has made the film both seem dated and an interesting icon or relic of the period. It is still an impressive piece of work, though it has arguably been slightly overshadowed by its super-slick 2002 remake Red Dragon, with Anthony Hopkins in his prequel to Hannibal. And, yes, this fourth film looks different again.

Mann makes a great job of sticking to the thriller mechanics of Harris’s remarkable story, giving the movie loads of sweaty-palm tension and allowing the characters space to breath. He turns in a powerful, anguish-driven thriller, while making a smart movie with its content backed up by a strong tragic, world-weary undercurrent of meaning and significance. In short, it’s about something.

It is not at all the kind of trash pulp movie people might fear from this kind of unhealthy, sensationalist story. Mann shows why he is one of the movies’ great directors, with a special flair for this kind of material (Heat, Collateral).

In a bravely bleak and chilly performance, the ideally cast Petersen is quietly dynamic, making no attempt to ingratiate himself as the hero, while Cox as Lecktor is much less showy than Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, but (despite being cramped in a much smaller role) only a little less chilling or effective. It is unlucky that Cox does not have more screen time, but still, this tiny appearance is the foundation of his long career in international movies.

The other useful cast members are Kim Greist as Graham’s troubled and soon endangered wife Molly, Joan Allen as Reba McClane, the blind woman Dollarhyde strikes up a relationship with, and Stephen Lang, who plays the gutter journalist Freddy Lounds, who makes the mistake of mocking Dollarhyde while trying to expose him in his gossip rag of a newspaper.

Dan Butler (Bulldog in TV’s Frasier) plays Jimmy Price and also appears in The Silence of the Lambs, but in a different role.

Frankie Faison is the only actor to appear in all four Hannibal films.

Producer Dino De Laurentiis had just had a flop movie with Year of the Dragon and thought it was unlucky to have another movie with Dragon in the title. Hence Manhunter, which eventually gave them the chance to remake it under its original title of Red Dragon. Manhunter flopped at the box office anyway. Superstition doesn’t work any magic.

Brian Cox is an Emmy Award-winning Scottish actor, born on June 1, 1946 in Dundee, Scotland. The initially mainly stage actor Cox started to appear on TV in 1965, and played Trotsky in the 1971 film Nicholas and Alexandra, and then starred in In Celebration (1975).

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© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 136

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