Great Scene: “Manhunter”

I think we’d all admit the first time Clarice Starling meets Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, that was a great scene.

But what about when we all were introduced to Dr. Lecter? That would be in the 1986 movie Manhunter. Written and directed by Michael Mann with a screenplay adapted from the novel “The Red Dragon” by Thomas Harris, here is a plot summary from IMDb:

Will Graham [William Petersen] is a former FBI agent who recently retired to Florida with his wife Molly and their young son. Graham was a ‘profiler’; one who profiles criminal’s behavior and tries to put his mind into the minds of criminals to examine their thoughts while visiting crime scenes. Will is called out of his self-imposed retirement at the request of his former boss Jack Crawford [Dennis Farina] to help the FBI catch an elusive serial killer, known to the press as the ‘Tooth Fairy’, who randomly kills whole families in their houses during nights of the full moon and leaves bite marks on his victims. To try to search for clues to get into the mind of the killer, Will has occasional meetings with Dr. Hannibal Lecktor [Brian Cox], a charismatic but very dangerous imprisoned serial killer that Will captured years earlier which nearly drove him insane from the horrific encounter that nearly cost Will’s life. With some help and hindrance, Will races against the clock before the next full moon when the ‘Tooth Fairy’ will strike again. Elsewhere, a local photographer named Francis Dollarhyde [Tom Noonan], the killer that Will is looking for, struggles to stay undetected while seeing a hope of redemption when be begins a relationship with a blind woman who is not aware of his double life.

Here is the first meeting between Will and Lector.

Here is a movie version of the scene.

It’s the same psychological games from Lector that we see in Lambs.

Manhunter is a really good movie. I also thought that Francis Dollarhyde was even more frightening than Buffalo Bill (but I’m basing that on my experience of reading the books as “The Red Dragon” totally freaked me out).

But the big question is which Lecter do you like better: Cox’s version or Hopkins?

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