MovieChat Forums > The Silence of the Lambs (1991) Discussion > How "Silence of the Lambs" Rescued Hanni...

How "Silence of the Lambs" Rescued Hannibal Lecter for the Ages

posted 2 years ago by ecarle (14979)
4 replies | jump to latest

This post is from a "personal perspective" but I would like to share it so that folks can see how "we almost lost Hannibal Lecter as a classic screen villain."

In the early 80's, I came across a paperback novel in a book store. It was called "Red Dragon" and it had a big blurb on the back cover from none other than Stephen King, calling it "the best novel of the year(or decade, or something.)" Or maybe "the best novel since The Godfather."

I was intrigued by King's quote, and I was intrigued by the brief plot description. I bought the book and read it. I'm a big fan of thriller movies(I don't read all the books I should) but here was a book that just cried out "This needs to be a MOVIE! And if it becomes a movie, it will be a classic -- right up there with Psycho and The Exorcist and Jaws."

Hannibal Lector was a comparatively small part of the book, but he was just so damn UNIQUE you knew he could join the roll call of great villains that had everyone from Dracula and The Wolf Man to Norman Bates and the possessed girl in The Exorcist.

There was his nickname: "Hannibal the Cannibal" and his taste for human flesh. There was the fact that he was at once supersmart AND superinsane. There was the fact that he could outthink all "normal good guys" (almost -- they still had him in a cell) and that he was a "killing machine" who could suddenly tear a nurse's tongue out without a change in his blood pressure.

Movie-wise, I saw Hannibal Lector as a mix of James Mason(the erudite and supersuave villain of Hitchcock's North by Northwest) and Mrs. Bates(the knife wielding merciless maniac whom mild-mannered Norman Bates BECAME when it was killin' time.)

But wait: Lector was rather the "back up villain" in Red Dragon. Front and center was the target of a manhunt: "The Tooth Fairy" a killer who bit his victims as well as slaughtering them, and with a terrifying means of selecting victims(he killed ENTIRE YOUNG FAMILIES): he worked in a photo processing lab and received home movies and photos of the families to process. As creator Thomas Harris wrote: "Familie were sending applications (to die) every day."

(This angle of Red Dragon is now obsolete with digital photography from cell phones, but back in the day, I myself had an acquaintance who worked in a photo lab and he himself said that photos were spied on all the time by workers.)

The cop hunting the Tooth Fairy was an "empath" of sorts named Will Graham, who had retired not long after accidentally disovering Hannibal Lector to be a killer -- and getting gutted by Lector in the process before shooting him to wound.

There were various other characters: Graham's cop boss luring him out of retirement; Graham's wife(hostage material), the blind woman who loves the Tooth Fairy because she can't see his face wounds -- and a particularly obnoxious tabloid reporter who is killed in a particularly gory way by the Tooth Fairy in revenge for a bad article.

Red Dragon was a GLORIOUS thriller and I couldn't wait for it to be made into a movie so everybody could meet Hannibal the Cannibal and I figured a great all-star cast would be corralled to make the movie and that a big star would play Hannibal and another big star would play Graham and yet a third big star would play the Tooth Fairy and...

..and no, that did not happen. Even with the estimable Michael Mann at the helm. Mann was riding high with Miami Vice and had made a stylized visual splash at the movies with Thief(1981) and had valuable scoring assistance from the synthesizer-based Tangerine Dream but...

...he made Red Dragon WRONG. First of all, Mann let the studio call it "Manhunter"(fears were that Red Dragon suggested a Kung Fu movie.) So many fans of the book didn't even know it had been made into a movie.

Second: Mann didn't cast stars in any of the roles. Almost all of these folks are known NOW, but none of them were known THEN, and even most of them today aren't that big(and in one case, dead.)

Will Graham was cast with the little known William Peterson(CSI was over a decade away.) Hannibal Lector was renamed("Lektor") marginalized in screen time and played sluggishly by the now-great then barely known Brian Cox. (A total waste of a potential star role.) Mann used his pals Dennis Farina(Crime Story) and Stephen Lang(Crime Story) as the FBI boss and the tabloid reporter, respectively, but they weren't very big then. And for The Tooth Fairy, Mann went with a strange looking unknown name of Tom Noonan.

If memory serves(and maybe it doesn't), Mann was pretty faithful to the book, but rendered it rather "flat"(he was then still more a TV guy than a movie guy) and...unless I'm mistaken..he threw out the great climax of the book (but I can't remember HOW he ended it.)

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Then the studio gave "Manhunter" no support. Perhaps the no-name cast; perhaps the gruesome details of cannibalism and family-killing. The movie came and went, sank without a trace.

And I -- for one -- felt that one of the greatest potential classic horror thrillers ever -- had blown its chance, and Hannibal the Cannibal Lector would never be known to anyone, much.

I'm guessing that "Red Dragon" author Thomas Harris felt exactly the same way - and decided to do something about it.

It took a few years, but Harris wrote a SEQUEL to Red Dragon. Out went the empath male Will Graham. In came the novice but tough female Clarice Starling. Hannibal the Cannibal would still be "secondary" but with more of a chance to kill and terrify and escape prison this time. A new "secondary psycho" -- less stylish than the Tooth Fairy but more horrific -- would be created (Buffalo Bill, who skins oversized young women for their skins to WEAR, Ed Gein style.) A new, sympathetic FBI agent/father figure for Clarice would be introduced. The book would be titled "Silence of the Lambs" and that would be a monologue for Clarice to tell and make movie history with.

And THIS time, the right people made and cast the book.

Hannibal the Cannibal got a second chance at stardom...and made it. And the actor playing him won a Best Actor Oscar. And the actress playing Clarice won a Best Actress Oscar. And the movie won Best Picture(the first horror thriller to do so, achieving what Psycho, The Exorcist, and Jaws could not.) And Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay came in , too. A triumph.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

Funny thing : THIS time around, the producers realized that Hannibal the Cannibal needed star casting. But Jack Nicholson turned it down. And so did Sean Connery. And so did Gene Hackman(who was also considering directing it.) And so did Robert Duvall. Anthony Hopkins finally took it. Hopkins had been struggling as a movie star since the 70's(he'd played a fine psycho ventriloquist in 1978's Magic, but with no real staying power.)

Hopkins had a certain British Shakespearean appeal, a confessed drinking problem, and a great voice. He also had a very huge head, which actually served him well once stardom arrived with Hannibal. He could really HOLD that screen with that head. And with success, he beat his drinking demons. And he became, finally a star (it was said in the 90's, if you couldn't get Sean Connery, book Anthony Hopkins.)

Jodie Foster took Clarice after Michelle Pffeiffer turned it down. Pffeiffer had recently worked for director Jonathan Demme("Married to the Mob") and in taking on this project Demme got his own liftoff higher up in the Hollywood power structure.

Scott Glenn was the calm, cold but caring FBI father figure to Clarice, but there wasn't much star casting below the top three. Unknown Ted Levine crafted a truly weird, lisping, creepy (but deceptively calm) Buffalo Bill.

Funny thing: Manhunter had been thrown away in the middling winter month of March 1986; Silence of the Lambs wasn't given a much better slot in February of 1991 -- but it got WAY more publicity, WAY more good reviews, and WAY more clout with recent Oscar winner Jodie Foster in the lead and Anthony Hopkins saying his famous "I ate the census taker..with fava beans and a nice Chianti" line in trailers (not to mention that sick sucking sound he made after saying it.)

Silence of the Lambs did the near impossible: opened in February 1991 and had staying power for over a year so as to win 5 of the top prizes at the Oscars in April 1992.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

But the irony got me even back then:

Hannibal the Cannibal probably could have bagged a lot of Oscars back in 1986/87 had they only made a really GOOD version of Red Dragon. The material was there.

More ironies abounded after SOTL swept everything in 1992 for 1991.

It took a full 10 years to get Hannibal on the screen again in 2001's "Hannibal." Hopkins returned; Foster did not; Julianne Moore took over the Clarice role and couldn't work the same combination of strength and tremulous insecurity with it. And the story was odd -- Hannibal on the loose at large in Italy and a deformed millionaire with killer pigs out to get him.

And then this: it took 10 years to get from Silence of the Lambs to Hannibal(Thomas Harris had to write Hannibal to get a movie made from it). It then only took ONE year to get from Hannibal to the next Hannibal Lecter movie: Red Dragon!

Full circle , 17 years later. "Red Dragon" finally made with an all star cast:

Anthony Hopkins(with hair dye to play younger): Finally as Hannibal in THIS story.
Edward Norton as cop Will Graham.
Harvey Keitel as Grahams' FBI boss (a bigger star than Dennis Farina was when HE played the role.)
Philip Seymour Hoffman as the ill-fated tabloid reporter(his murder in THIS version was sick and terrifying.)
Ralph Fiennes as The Tooth Fairy.

And some estimable actresses too: Emily Watson as the blind woman who loves the Tooth Fairy, Mary Louise Parker as Will Graham's wife(in a restored climax removed from Manhunter.)

Yes, Red Dragon had finally been made the way it should have been, with the cast it should have had, and the climax of the book restored but...it was rather too late. We'd had two other Hannibal movies in the past ten years and he was at once a household name and kind of "familiar." Still I am glad we have the movie of "Red Dragon." It is much better than "Manhunter."

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

And so, a rarity in movie history: a great book becomes a flop movie that almost loses to the world a great horror character(Hannibal the Cannibal)...but the author writes a sequel and a new set of filmmakers save Hannibal for history and win some actors, a director, and a writer Oscars to further justify the greatness of the story.

Only in Hollywood.

PS. Interestingly, author Thomas Harris has written only one other book - one other thriller -- to go along with his otherwise exclusive cache of "Hannibal Lecter stories." It was his first novel -- Black Sunday -- about Arab terrorists using a crazed American ex-POW and the Goodyear blimp to kill everybody at the Super Bowl with a bomb. It was made into a good 1977 thriller that flopped at the box office. (Why? The terror angle? Nobody fears a BLIMP?) Maybe Black Sunday will get a remake someday....