Manhunter

In 1986, Michael Mann, then famous for directing Thief (1981) and the TV show Miami Vice, adapted Thomas Harris' novel Red Dragon for the big screen.  Red Dragon is the gruesome page-turner that introduced the psychopathic Hannibal Lecter to the world.  Mann's version of the novel, the first adaptation of Harris' cycle of novels featuring this character, is called Manhunter.  (The producer didn't want people to confuse the film with Michael Cimino's box-office failure Year of the Dragon.)  Mann's movie was too far before its time, and, so heavily stylized that most critics mistook it for a kind of music video, pretty but superficial, and, so, it flopped at the box-office.  I was apparently one of the few people who saw the movie on the big screen -- I recall being irritated by the picture's aesthetics, but some of the scenes in the film have stayed with me all of my life.  (In particular, I recall a very scary sequence in which a man strapped to a wheel-chair is lit on fire and rolls down the ramp of an underground parking lot, the figure engulfed in flame blasting forward right into the face of the viewer; another sequence, involving a runner, is so audacious that no one ever mentions it, but, when I saw the film on TV, sure enough the sequence, which I thought I might have dreamed, is right there on-screen, part of the movie.)  Later, The Silence of the Lambs made this material popular and a series of films featuring Lecter and Harris' other grotesque serial killers ensued with the result that Manhunter was remade, this time under the story's proper title Red Dragon (2002), the name of the source novel.  Manhunter is different from the other versions of these stories and, in some ways, better -- as the charismatic  Lecter character is elaborated in subsequent novels and film adaptations, he becomes a sort of super-hero, vested with semi-magical powers and involved in ever more outrageous and baroque plots, none of them even remotely as convincing as Lecter's cameo role in Manhunter and the novel on which it is based.  Mann shoots the film with characters posed against neon-haze or voids that glow like Rothko paintings -- whole sequences are shot in completely unnatural light, the figures tinted by the deep violet or sunset orange.  Slow-motion is deployed to extend and delay action and the climactic shoot-out is filmed by cameras keyed to record the mayhem at different speeds -- this gives the violence an odd stuttering, slightly off-focus effect:  it seems both hyper-real and unreal at the same time.  There are lurid effects:  a couple visualized by the murderous psychopath seems to radiate blinding light.  Corpses with mirrors stuck in their eyes and nostrils and mouths look like strange angelic beings, vessels blazing with glacially white radiance.  When the two investigators debate the facts and, ultimately figure out the villain's modus operandi, the hero is posed against a window that opens onto a towering skyscraper with a halo of neon-white around its summit, a rococo image for the illumination that the character experiences when he solves the crime (it's the Mann-equivalent of a cartoon light bulb suddenly appearing next to a character's head to signify a moment of intuitive brilliance.)  The murderer's pad is equipped with a wall-size mural of Mars, the red planet on which "Red Dragon", the killer's totemic icon, seems to dwell -- at the climax, the killer tooting a sawed-off shotgun bursts through the mural, literally emerging from the Martian landscape.  (Otherwise, the killer's home is full of interesting abstract still-lifes: a clay jug on a shelf is lit like a painting by Morandi.)  There are shots set in laboratories where film is developed and, so, the characters are imprisoned in weird darkness or ultra-violet or infra-red light.  The sky is always glowing with sunset and the houses where the killings have occurred are ultra-chic modernist palaces, pale and curvilinear with strange jutting balconies, cantilevered steps, odd white piers (the architecture looks like the work of Venturi and Rauch, seaside villas with gleaming white walls -- apparently, one of the scenes was shot in Robert Rauschenberg's home on the water somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico.)  The entire film is a sort of assault on the senses -- there is a constant drone and throb of techno-rock, buzzing undertones with coruscating pulsing rhythm:  the whole soundtrack, which is continuous, wall to wall, under the images, doesn't illustrate the action but rather acts to distance everything, giving the whole film the sense that it is some kind of music video.  (The technodrone music is like Tangerine Dream, who scored Mann's Thief, and the industrial hum of the music often sounds like the Phil Collins' song   but without the lyrics.)

The plot is pretty much standard stuff, although this level of graphic violence and horror in a mainstream film was unusual in 1986.  A psycho-killer is murdering whole families, apparently posing the bloody corpses with mirrors stuck in their eyes and mouths.  A heroic FBI man, Will  Graham, gone into retirement after almost being killed by the cannibal Lektor (as the name is spelled in this film), is enticed into trying to solve the murders and capture the villain, dubbed the "Tooth Fairy" by the tabloids.  (The bad guy's insanity is almost comically over-determined:  he uses golden dentures to bite off  his victim's faces, suffers from moon-madness (the full moon induces his killings), worships William Blake's terrifying image of the Red Dragon and the woman of light, imagines his home to be Mars, and has a number of other bizarre quirks as well.)  This walking, talking manifestation of insanity, however, passes as normal and has a job as a photo developer, a trade that allows him to study in detail the intimate details of his victim's life, all so that he can better plot his murders.  (He spends hours screening home-movies of the families he intends to kill.)  Graham and his side kick, played by Dennis Farina, set out to capture the Tooth Fairy and prevent him from killing again.  In order to psyche-out the motivations of the insane Tooth Fairy, Graham trains himself to experience states of madness (sort of homeopathic approach to crime detection) -- he embarks on the questionable practice of trying to enter into the villain's mind.  (This is a standard trope today -- you have to think like a serial killer to catch one -- a questionable, if highly melodramatic concept, invoked by shows as disparate as CSI and Mindhunter, but it was a relatively new idea in 1986).  Graham enlists the help of his old nemesis, the Dr. Moriarty of serial killers, Hannibal Lecter.  Lecter is so intimidating that Graham flees him, picturesquely running down huge ramps in some kind of post-modern panopticon insane asylum, another example of Mann's borrowings from the esthetic and architectural motifs found in Antonioni movies.  Lecter gets in league with the Tooth Fairy and the bad guys threaten Graham's blonde wife -- she looks like a fashion model -- and his cute tow-headed son.  This makes things personal for Graham and he intensifies his efforts to catch the bad guy.  Tom Noonan playing the huge Frankenstein-like monster,  Francis Dolarhyde (the Tooth Fairy's real name) is excellent, conveying somehow both hideous rage conjoined with a fragile, almost infantile vulnerability.  Harris is a maximalist as a novelist and just keeps piling melodramatic situations on top of one another.  Not content with having the Tooth Fairy plotting to kill a whole family, Harris' novel introduces a love element into the story -- an aspect of his "throw in the kitchen-sink" kind of narrative that seriously disfigured the later Hannibal Lecter novels.  (Harris never knows when enough is enough -- in one of his books, he has a guy who literally drinks cocktails made from the tears of tormented orphans).  Manhunter bogs down in a love story in which the Tooth Fairy romances a blind woman -- yes, that's right, a blind woman.  (The woman is played very well as mixture of helplessness and true grit by Joan Allen).  The sex scenes between the monster and the woman are among the best things in the film -- Dolarhyde reverts to sucking the thumb of his lover, all of this tinted in some garish neon-color by Mann's cinematographer.  With his forehead furrowed and his eyes expressing unutterable loneliness, Dolarhyde's madness is so manifest that these scenes probe the kind of ultimate damnation that one can glimpse in the granddaddy of this genre, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.  Ultimately, there's lots of blood shed and the bad guy is riddled with bullets so that blood gushes out of him giving the dead body the sort of scarlet wings that Blake painted in his horrific image.  Mann studiously, even, pedantically works out metaphors about blindness and seeing -- the mirrors in the eyes of the corpses, the dark rooms and laboratories where film is developed, the villain endlessly watching home movies, our own desire to see and yet not see, and, at last, the oldest gag in the book:  the monster menacing the beautiful blind woman.

About one-third through the film, Mann pauses and comments on his own stylistic antics.  The cops set up a sting and when a running man appears, there's a big chase with drawn guns, almost all of it filmed in iconic slow-motion.  The running man turns out to be just a black jogger.  When he's asked why he fled the advancing cops, he says something like "What would you do if saw a bunch of guys comin' at you in slow-motion?"  The scene is wonderful and hilarious but everyone pretends that it doesn't exist. You will never find this moment mentioned in any mainstream summary of the movie  but it really the best thing in the film.