Five years before The Silence of the Lambs, there was writer-director Michael Mann’s pioneering Thomas Harris adaptation Manhunter, now on re-release in a director’s “final cut” for its 40th anniversary. It was his version of Harris’s 1981 novel Red Dragon, a movie which features Dr Hannibal Lecter (here spelt Lecktor) in a relatively minor part, and played in a much more coolly matter-of-fact and downbeat way by Brian Cox, who is first discovered in his cell lying down with his back to the camera.
It has long been a haughty, hipster film-bro affectation to claim that Cox is better in the role than Anthony Hopkins. (Lecktor’s early acoustic stuff was great, you see, before he went electric as Lecter.) I think that’s a bit obtuse, for all that Cox is of course very good. Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs is the definitive version: face it. But I will concede that Cox is more interesting than Hopkins by the time the latter came to make the 2002 adaptation of Red Dragon, at which stage the franchise had become a bit tired. Manhunter itself is a very interesting and watchable movie, but feels a little unevolved compared to Jonathan Demme’s masterly guignol spectacle, although Demme clearly inhaled Mann’s excitement at jets, ’copters and military hardware deployed at speed to bring down just one man.
