(In the spirit of the Shotgun relaunch, and while I’m busy with movie polls and such, I’ve decided to recycle some of my earliest home video reviews into the new format. Since most of what I was reviewing back then were classic or nearly classic films anyway, I thought they deserved a new airing.

This first recycled offering was originally posted in August of 2001. I’ve updated some of the information and added, uhm, one or two notes, as is my wont.)

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

1 hr., 58 m. / original studio: Orion Pictures / rated R

directed by Jonathan Demme; screenplay by Ted Tally, from novel by Thomas Harris; director of photography, Tak Fujimoto; edited by Craig McKay; music by Howard Shore

with: Jodie Foster (Clarice Starling), Anthony Hopkins (Hannibal Lecter), Scott Glenn (Jack Crawford), Ted Levine (Buffalo Bill)

As part of the FBI’s attempt to profile a serial killer who skins his victims, a female trainee is assigned to gain the trust of a psychotic genius being held in ultra-maximum security.

A riveting thriller-cum-horror tale, The Silence of the Lambs is one of the all-time great box-office sleepers, rivaling Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) as a media phenomenon in its initial release and establishing the character of Dr. Hannibal Lecter as a contemporary icon of dread to rank with the likes of Dracula. Sixteen years later The Silence of the Lambs has lost none of its power as one of the most disturbing movies ever made, a superior, modern gothic entertainment which gazes fearlessly into the darkest labyrinth of human psychosis and leaves us deeply unsettled, but safe, when it ends. At least, safe for the moment.

Of course the film owed much of its breakout success to Anthony Hopkins’ performance as Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist with issues of his own: in serial killer mode, the doctor likes to eat a piece of his victims — a liver here, a nose there, depending on his mood and time constraints. Lecter made his first appearance in Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon (1981) and the subsequent film of that book, Manhunter (1986), where he performed essentially the same narrative function as he does here, serving as a kind of oracle for an investigator on the trail of a serial killer. In the earlier film (directed by Michael Mann, with Brian Cox in the role) Lecter is a marginal figure whose villainy is discussed by other characters and implied in a surly attitude, but finally never really shown (see Notes).

By the time of his encore in The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter has become a supernaturally perceptive student of human weakness, able to profile other serial killers with remarkable precision and give the authorities all the clues they need to find their suspects. The trick is in convincing him to open up and share, a task he always uses to secure better living conditions in prison and to exact a psychological price from his interviewers. In dealing with him, it’s best for investigators to keep in mind Nietzsche’s dictum that “when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

As a character in what might be called a realistic melodrama, Lecter is an outrageous conceit — serial killers just aren’t that smart as a rule. They may possess a certain flair for attracting victims or eluding detection in everyday reality, because the monstrosity of their intentions is so at odds with the experience of the average person. But they rarely, if ever, come from upper socio-economic backgrounds, never mind higher education (unless one counts politicians and/or corporate overlords, a whole other category of mass murderer). The odds against a Lecter being produced by our world — an epicurean medical doctor who embraces the furthest extremes of his own psychosis — are astronomical.

But that doesn’t mean he could never happen. A story about the horrifying world of serial killers, which is already so far beyond what most of us can imagine for any length of time without feeling queasy, cries out for an invention like Lecter to be our narrative guide into hell. His psychoses, worn on his sleeve in captivity, make him a much more reliable student of the abyss than some dry investigator who has covered a few case histories. Every moment spent with Lecter makes palpable the true nature of the danger any detective faces in trying to identify with and catch one of these human monsters. It’s better to let the master do the imagining.

Enter Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling, the film’s moral center and, despite the egregious popularity of her mentor/nemesis, the main character of the piece. As realistically conceived as Lecter is a fantasy, Starling is one of the first truly feminist characters in modern American cinema. She’s physically strong, eminently competent, but her greatest asset as a budding investigator is also her greatest weakness: she is driven by an overwhelming compassion for others, with a particularly fine-tuned sense of duty to protect the world’s victims.

When these polar opposites — Lecter and Starling — come together at twelve-and-a-half minutes into the film, the fireworks are astonishing, two of the best performances by a man and a woman ever captured on film. Hopkins is witty and dazzling (though some like to whine that he is over the top, despite the lack of eye-rolling and hair pulling), investing Lecter with a preternatural, malevolent stillness that redefined the portrayal of evil onscreen. Relatively unknown to the larger film audience before The Silence of the Lambs, Hopkins obviously realized that Lecter was the character role of his career and he seized upon it with all the powers of a born maestro.

But the indispensable catalyst for his performance is Foster’s equal investment in Starling, a perfectly nuanced set of reactions to Lecter’s villainy that not only work to make him a dominant presence in every scene, whether he is there or not, they also reveal reams about her own character. It’s an incredibly giving performance, which befits Starling, and though it risks giving a master scene-stealer like Hopkins even more fuel for his creative flame, she, too, is in complete control of her instrument, giving as good as she gets, never letting us forget what he is.

The script by playwright Ted Tally is a model of dramatic distillation, extracting the core drama out of Harris’ long conversations between the two main characters and superbly balancing their creepy exchanges with the more conventional suspense tale that frames the relationship: the search for a serial killer nicknamed Buffalo Bill. Tally is keeping a dozen balls in the air at once, populating the story with many fully drawn minor characters, blending Harris’ imaginative mix of genre elements in just the right portions — one part haunted house screamer, one part police procedural, one part mytho-gothic character study.

It’s all held together with great style and intelligence by director Jonathan Demme, who clearly knows how to get the best out of each actor and craftsperson in his charge and who sees the value of underplaying the most gruesome effects to achieve a nearly unbroken line of tension. Demme, like his directorial model for this film, Alfred Hitchcock, knows just how much horror to show a modern audience, and when, making the viewer’s imagination fill in the worst details. Perhaps most important for this kind of popular movie, he is continually injecting humor into unlikely moments along with the atmosphere, giving the audience a breather before the next set of uncomfortable thrills.

A once-in-a-lifetime kind of film in which all the choices were right and all creative elements came together just so, The Silence of the Lambs is not a movie for the squeamish and it still retains a reputation as an exceptionally violent experience. The truth is that its body count — a total of three onscreen deaths — is extremely low in comparison with the common slasher film, or with many more acceptable, PG-13, action-adventure movies, in which the death and destruction are sterilized and only “bad” people die (and cleanly, at that). Its real violence is psychological, imparted subtly through the reactions of its humanitarian protagonist Starling, and overtly in the thick, suspenseful world created by Demme and his crew, where a new unspeakable terror seems to lurk around every corner. But it is not a callous movie; it’s a frightening movie that pulls no punches when pulling no punches really matters, and which tells an unbearable truth for those who can take it: things do not always turn out all right, and for every dragon that is slain, there is generally another lying in wait who is worse. The lambs may stop screaming, but you can’t save them all.

Filled with unforgettable moments including: Lecter’s now-storied entrance; a chilling autopsy scene; the bad doctor’s Oh-No-Cover-Your-Eyes escape from custody; the moment Starling and her target recognize each other; and the nail-biting finale in a monster’s underground lair. Unlike Lecter, Buffalo Bill is a realistic amalgam of actual serial killers, especially Ed Gein, who was also the model for Norman Bates.

The music score, cinematography and film editing are all first-class.

NOTES:

TOO SCARY: Screen rights to The Silence of the Lambs were originally purchased for Gene Hackman, who intended to both direct and star as Lecter. He bowed out of the project with misgivings over the intense subject matter. When Demme came on board, he tried to interest his pal Michelle Pfeiffer in the role of Starling, having worked with her on Married to the Mob (1988), but she also declined because she thought the story was too violent.

THE TRILOGY: Under pressure from book fans and his publisher, Thomas Harris reluctantly turned out Hannibal, a sequel, some ten years after Lambs was a bestseller. The book was a pitch black comedy inside a snake pit, not exactly movie material, but that didn’t stop Ridley Scott, or Anthony Hopkins, or an excellent supporting cast, from making a film version in 2001. The movie was okay, as movies that celebrate evil go.The following year it was decided to remake Red Dragon, this time with its rightful title, again with a terrific cast, so that Hopkins could take full possession of the role for his fans. The film of Red Dragon, for my money, is neither better nor worse than Manhunter. Same story, different actors. And neither Red Dragon nor Hannibal is essential to enjoying The Silence of the Lambs.

THE MASTER: Welshman Sir Anthony Hopkins (b. 1937) was an understudy to Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre in the 60s and was so good the maestro almost didn’t hire him out of professional jealousy. Hopkins does an astonishing imitation of his former mentor, which led to his dubbing the deceased Olivier’s lost audio tracks for the restored Spartacus in 1991. A great Shakespearean, Hopkins’ theatrical reputation superceded his film career for three decades before The Silence of the Lambs catapulted him to international stardom at the age of fifty-four. Some other great Hopkins performances on film: The Elephant Man (1980), The Remains of the Day and Shadowlands (both 1993), Nixon (1995) The World’s Fastest Indian (2005).

THE EXCEPTION: Jodie Foster (b. 1962) had been a professional actor for a quarter century when she played Clarice Starling and was already an Oscar winner for her stunning performance as the white trash victim of a gang rape in The Accused (1988). The exception to the rule that child stars are never successful adult stars, she got her first full-time gig as a Disney contract player when she was eight, but even her childhood roles showed a remarkable range and sensitivity, not to mention artistic daring. This was most obvious in her portrayal of the child prostitute Iris in Taxi Driver (1976) at the age of twelve, easily holding her own with De Niro and Harvey Keitel.

Lambs gave her the clout to branch into producing and directing, which she has done with modest success while she concentrated on motherhood. She’s recently started to appear in more films again, alternating between plucky thriller heroines (the dim-witted Flightplan) and shady thriller villains (Spike Lee’s Inside Man). Her next film as a director will be Sugarland, due in ’08, re-teaming her with De Niro for the first time since 1976.

THAT’S WHERE I’VE SEEN THAT GUY: The actor doing such a beautiful job of putting a human face on Buffalo Bill is Ted Levine (b. 1957). His risky performance in this film was not only overshadowed by the stars, he had a tough time finding any good roles for a decade. He’s now a kindly straight man to Tony Shalhoub’s Monk on the USA network.

Schlockmeister Roger Corman (b. 1926), who gave Demme and a lot of other people their first jobs in Hollywood, appears as the FBI director.

AWARDS: One of only 3 films in Oscar history to win in the so-called top five categories: Best Picture, Actor (Hopkins), Actress (Foster), Screenplay (Adapted) and Director. (The other films were It Happened One Night, 1934, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975.)

Lambs was also only the third film in the thriller genre to even be nominated for Best Picture, and the first Best Picture winner in several decades to be released a full twelve months before nominations were announced. Typically, Best Picture nominees are released in the last quarter of any given year because of the Academy’s historically short memory, but no one even dreamed that Lambs had a chance of serious consideration until it started getting top honors from the Berlin Film Festival, the Directors Guild, the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle.

THE DVD: Arguably the most poorly handled major film in recent memory, The Silence of the Lambs has enjoyed three wildly variant DVD releases in nine years, probably because it was the ugly stepchild from MGM/UA’s buyout of Orion. No one has ever understood how to sell this film.

Its latest incarnation, which I haven’t seen, is a two-disc “collector’s edition” that was released in January with a new, purportedly informative 60-minute documentary, though according to reviews, it mostly cites information you have already found right here. There are a few of the usual outtakes and deleted scenes, a 10-minute featurette from 1991, and a gallery of TV spots offering minute variations on the same pitch. It retails for a whopping $26.98 and is obviously designed to appeal to the “typical” viewer, whoever that is.

It’s an expansion on MGM/UA’s 2001 single disc, which merely contained the movie, and maybe I’m becoming cranky in my advancing years but isn’t that all anyone really needs? Unless you’re just a completely rabid fan of a certain film and want to spend days watching everything about it. That disc, called the “special edition” is still available, new and used. New, it’s $19 and change.

All of this obscures the outstanding first release at the dawn of the DVD revolution by — who else? — Criterion, which was an adaptation of their original laser disc for the film. Containing the usual, thoughtful Criterion extras for connoisseurs, like an authentic FBI manual and some of the film’s storyboards, its most important feature is an all-star commentary track with Demme, Foster, Hopkins, Ted Tally and renowned federal agent John Douglas, the man who founded the FBI’s behavioral unit. MGM/UA may own licensing rights to the film, but Criterion owns the commentary, so it will never appear anywhere else. The disc’s retail price was $35, like all early Criterions, but it can still be tracked down for a variety of prices at Amazon, as can all of the above.

MORE CLASSICS RECENTLY RELEASED ON DVD:

What a time to be alive. It’s bold, it’s goofy, it’s today:

The ever creative Francis Coppola just put out Apocalypse Now — The Complete Dossier through Paramount, a marvelous double disc that includes both the original film and its 2001 incarnation Apocalypse Now Redux. Excellent documentaries on the creation of the original and an insightful, in-depth commentary by Francis himself, who can talk a blue streak, as we used to say.

Warner Home Video finally released a special edition of The Maltese Falcon, the film that made Humphrey Bogart a star and the private eye film respectable. In addition to the usual fine WHV extras it contains two previous, failed versions of the film! Why? No one knows.

Meanwhile, Criterion just gets busier and busier, recently giving us Sidney Gilliat’s near legendary wartime thriller Green for Danger and the Holy Grail of Italian Neo Realism, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, a must-see in anybody’s book. The company is also on a Jules Dassin noir kick, so they’ve just released The Naked City, and Brute Force is due on April 17.

COMING SOON (OR, THIS IS WHAT DVD IS FOR):

Robert Altman’s excellent Thieves Like Us will also be out 4/17; the 1944 Jane Eyre with Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine on 4/24; the infamous Alejandro Jodorowski’s infamous El Topo (1970) on 5/1, and for classic cartoon aficionados, Max Fleischer’s Popeye the Sailor, Vol. 1, 1933-1938 is scheduled for late July

Here is your

CROSS-DISCIPLINARY CLASSIC MOVIE THOUGHT FOR THE MONTH:

“Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.” — André Gide

Barker’s Classic Movies #8 was Casablanca 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2007 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Barker's Classics, DVD, Eric Barker, Film. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.