Perfect Films: “Manhunter”

*** SPOILERS BELOW ***

As any old movie buff knows (and many younger ones, too), crime thrillers in 1980s almost constituted their own sub-genre. That is, they had their own special vibe. Slick. Stylish. Erotic. Typically, they boasted good-looking actors with great 80s hair, wearing garish 80s clothes and doing dangerous things. These were exotic and entertaining films, usually set in one of two environments: a dark city landscape (i.e. L.A.) or a gorgeous, sun-drenched beach (i.e. Miami). 

And then there was the soundtrack. Synth-heavy, but punctuated with propulsive rock songs from the era—usually something from Genesis or Phil Collins. Take 1984’s Against All Odds, for example, starring Jeff Bridges and Rachel Ward. Collins wrote and sang the theme song for that one, garnering him an Oscar nom. (And, yes, that movie was set against a dark L.A. landscape and a gorgeous beach.)

But my absolute favorite 1980s crime thriller, by far, is a movie almost no one remembers: Michael Mann’s 1986 serial killer flick Manhunter. I saw it when it first came out in 1986, and then saw it again, quickly, before it vanished from the cineplexes forever. In the forty years since, the film has gotten almost no respect, except from a few cinephiles like me. (Quinten Tarantino is a famous booster; he put Manhunter on his list of favorite 1980s films.) 

I’ve often wondered why Manhunter is so underappreciated. It probably has something to do with its lame title, which the studio forced Mann for reasons too stupid to discuss here. The original working title was, of course, Red Dragon, taken from the source novel by Thomas Harris. I often think that if the studio had stuck with that title, the film would have been a hit. Another reason is that the brilliant soundtrack, which mostly samples great songs from the era but includes great original music from The Reds, was soon deemed as “dated”. (It has actually come back into fashion thanks to the rise of the Synthwave aesthetic.) 

But whatever the reason, the film’s failure at the box office was a tragedy. Manhunter is a simply brilliant movie. Yes, it feels a lot like an episode of Miami Vice. And why not? Mann created Miami Vice. But it’s also a brilliant drama about a good man—the protagonist, F.B.I. agent and profiler, Will Graham—who forces himself into the mindset of serial killers in order to catch them. 

It’s a strange talent he has, and one he has used several times—to his great peril. The film’s opening finds him on a Florida beach, sitting with his old boss, Jack Crawford, who is trying to convince him to come back to work. A new serial killer nicknamed The Tooth Fairy is slaughtering nice, white, suburban families, and Jack needs help finding him. But the last time Will did this kind of gig, he almost got killed by the madman in question—an evil genius named Hannibal Lector. (The character’s surname is spelled Lektor in this movie, for some reason, but yeah—he’s the same character that Anthony Hopkins would make famous five years later in The Silence of the Lambs.) So, Will is a man who really, really doesn’t want to go back to his old job. As played by William Petersen (later, of CSI fame) with great depth and soul, Will is a man who was hollowed out—almost literally—by his last encounter with evil. He is still healing from old wounds, some physical but mostly psychological. In effect, his job was to become, temporarily, as nuts as a psychopath, and he doesn’t want to go there again.

Naturally, whenever a movie sets up this kind of moral dilemma in Act I, you know the hero will make the noble choice to go back into the fray. (If he didn’t, there wouldn’t be an Act II.) And Will makes that choice, too. However, I really like how Mann makes the viewer share the anguish and fear that Will feels. 

In the very next scene, he gives his wife, Molly (Kim Greist), the bad news, and then proceeds to make passionate love to her. Their bedroom is set against a blue backdrop of a moonlit ocean. As viewers, we sense that this environment—his beach-house, his marriage, etc.—is close to paradise as he will get on this earth, and we feel his horror at having to leave it—especially since he knows he might not come back this time.

The movie switches gears, into that of an extremely tense and effective police procedural. Will goes to visit the house of the Tooth Fairy’s most recent victims, a family in the suburbs of Atlanta. Will chooses to go at night, about the same time that the killer did his evil work. When the cop who drives him there offers to show him around, Will refuses; he wants to go in alone, just like the killer. 

The following scene, which runs for over five minutes, is one of the most haunting in all cinema. How many directors would be brave enough to put their main character in a house, alone, for five minutes of screen time? Will, narrating his actions into a tape recorder, enters the house through the same sliding glass door that the killer used, noting that the man’s “entry was skillful.” He then notes how the cool, air-conditioned air of the house must have felt to the killer, having just come inside from a hot night. As Will works his way upstairs, Mann’s the tension almost to the point where most viewers either turn away from the screen or watch through their fingers. Then comes the climax, when Will enters the bedroom of the murdered couple, and he finally turns on the lights. The camera cuts to the gored-soaked room, with even its walls and ceiling bloody (from   “arterial spray,” as Will notes into his recorder.) 

In a lesser film, this scene would have been perfunctory—mere plot-plumbing—with the hero snooping around the crime scene and discovering a few clues. But in Mann’s vision, the scene becomes an event. A journey. It also sets up the narrative pattern for most of the movie, with Will walking in the footsteps of the unknown villain, reconstructing his thoughts and actions. 

But merely visiting the scenes of the Tooth Fairie’s crimes is not enough. Will soon realizes he needs to regain the psychotic mindset in the quickest way possible—by visiting a real, live psychopath. His choice, of course, is Hannibal Lector, the man he caught on his last case (and who almost killed him). 

All these decades later, it’s interesting to compare the way the following interrogation sequence works in Manhunter as opposed to Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs. In the later film, Clarice Starling descends the dark, dungeon-like sub-basement of an insane asylum to meet Dr. Lector, standing up behind his glass pane. In Manhunter, the asylum is a sterile, post-modern labyrinth. Lector’s cell is small and white, brightly lit, with the doctor himself resembling nothing so much as a pale, fat worm as he lies on his cot, sleeping.

It’s probably safe to say that no one will ever top Anthony Hopkins’ performance in the role that would come to define his career. But in Manhunter, another British stage actor, Brian Cox (who only became truly famous to American audiences in the last decade) comes damn close. His version of the mad doctor is brittle, snitty, condescending, and (of course) razor sharp. He insults Will’s aftershave (in both films, Lector has a keen, animalistic sense of smell) and yet wonders if Will received his birthday card. 

Cox’s interpretation of Lector is, of course, very different from Hopkin’s. How could it not be. Manhunter is a completely different kind of movie. Both films are, ostensibly, crime thrillers, but let’s face it: The Silence of the Lambs is really a horror movie, while Manhunter is really a cop movie. A detective thriller. And Cox’s performance suits it perfectly. He brings just the right mix of wicked charm and perverse loathsomeness. 

Cox’s Lector is, in many ways, the direct opposite of the film’s true villain, the Tooth Fairy killer. We don’t see him until the third act, when the narrative shifts to that of a tall, lumbering, shy man named Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan, brilliant in the role) who works at a film processing plant in Missouri. With his saturnine features and phlegmatic, almost sheepish gestures, Dollarhyde seems more like a sad-sack everyman, worthy of our sympathy. But, as we soon realize through clues both subtle and not-so-subtle, he is, in fact, The Tooth Fairy. One of these not-so-subtle clues comes when Dollarhyde enters the dark-room of a blind film-technician, Reba (Joan Allen in a fine, early role), who works at the plant. He asks for her help with some specialized, low-light film. (What are you filming? she asks. “The activities of nocturnal animals,” he answers.) 

Reba soon finds herself on a date with Dollarhyde, and, in true Hitchcockian fashion, Mann makes the viewer squirm on their edge of their seat, waiting to see when—and how—Dollarhyde will rape and/or kill her. But once again, the movie subverts expectations. It’s Reba who makes the first (overtly sexual) move, and the two become lovers. Clearly, this is Dollarhyde’s first experience of lovemaking, and it kindles whatever is left of his better nature. In a kind of echo of the film’s opening scenes with Will and Molly on the beach, Dollarhyde and Reba cuddle in the morning sunshine by a nearby pond. It’s a great, unexpectedly sweet moment. It also represents Dollarhyde’s last, best chance at a “good” life. 

Alas, fate—and his own, tortured past—conspires against him. Even as Will finally makes the mental connection that leads to his finding of Dollarhyde’s identity, Dollarhyde has a paranoid episode. He kills a male coworker, kidnaps Reba, and takes her back to his house. The last half-hour is a bravura set-piece, an almost literal race-to-the-finish to see if Will can reach Dollarhyde’s house and stop him before he kills Reba. It’s one of the most exciting endings of any film of the 1980s. Which is fitting, because Manhunter, silly-title or no, is the best crime thriller of that era.