Manhunter and films of their time
There are timeless films and then there are films of their time. Michael Mann’s 1986 neo-noir Manhunter is both.
Adapted from the Thomas Harris thriller Red Dragon the film is almost a 1980s time capsule in movie form (more so even than James Cameron’s The Terminator released two years prior).
Such is Manhunter’s pervasive influence on both silver screen thrillers and TV crime procedurals the plot would be castigated as ‘cliched’ by modern standards. In fact in 1986 it was groundbreaking.
Will Graham (William Peterson) has a disturbing gift at getting into the minds of serial killers and he’s brought out of semi-retirement to track down a murderer who operates on a lunar cycle butchering families and putting mirror shards into their eyes.
But Graham’s gift is also a curse as he loses his mind into that of the killer and fears unravelling entirely.
Graham, scared of his own skills, has a timeframe to try and catch the so-called Tooth Fairy before he strikes again and he enlists the help of Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox), who he caught before trying to quit the detective game.
From the synth-heavy score, the 80s throwback soundtrack (The Prime Movers’ Strong As I Am is sublime), the strong colour cues and jump cuts, Mann dips heavily into his box of tricks to turn a cat-and-mouse game into one of the finest thrillers of the 80s.
Upon its release in August 1986 Manhunter was greeted with ‘mixed’ reviews.
The New York Times’ Walter Goodman wrote:
“The main trouble is Mr. Mann’s taste for overkill; attention keeps being diverted away from the story to the odd camera angles, the fancy lighting, the crashing music, and you realize you’re being had. It’s like catching a glimpse of the gimmicks in the magician’s bag.”
A scathing Dave Kehr for the Chicago Tribune wrote: “Manhunter is full of useful tips on interior decoration, but a movie it’s not.”
It has since undergone a major critical re-evaluation and held up as one of Mann’s very best alongside Thief and Heat.
Speaking in 2001 Mann said the project, which was also a commercial flop, had been doomed from the start — the financier’s thought Red Dragon sounded like a Chinese kung fu movie hence the Manhunter title.
The cast lacked any A-list names but instead the 80s and the trappings become a star themselves.
Characters are casually dressed in $1,000 suits, a modernist art museum is used as the exterior of the psychiatric prison where Lecktor is held and horizontal lines are a consistent motif (horizons are a particular favourite), along with mirrors and screens.
Whereas some modern directors see violence as a sign of a ‘grown-up’ movie (namely, Zack Snyder’s derisory Watchmen), Mann draws back from the bloodshed, leaving it to our own imagination — much like the haunted Graham who stalks the crime scenes with a tape recorder, narrating his way through the massacre to generate clues and leads.
Mann sees Graham as “torn apart by getting too close to the criminal’s mind… I never wanted a movie with explicit violence… the film is less about the killings themselves than about Graham’s consciousness, his methods of detection.”
It’s about Graham’s struggle with himself as he gets into the mind of the Tooth Fairy.
Staring into a rain-streaked window at the airport Graham, addressing himself almost as much as the Tooth Fairy, says: “It’s just you and me now, sport.”
In the book Michael Mann Cinema and Television: Interviews, 1980–2012 Mann said:
“It bores me to present the events of the story in a realist style. My approach instead is to conceptualize the elements of the plot, taking into consideration the various torments of the human spirit.
“My aim is to exteriorize the spiritual in the Expressionist manner, and this always leads me to reject realism. What drew me to the story was its connection to the essence of evil, which emerges in the process of dehumanization that leads a simple human being with no exceptional past to become a killer capable of the most terrible atrocities.
“And when the victims cease being human beings, they become morsels… bits of matter. I want to understand just what this is all about, and also something about dangerous psychopaths, as well as the influence of social context on the behavior of individuals, such as fascism, genocide.”
That social context? Well, the structure of Manhunter was revolutionary too.
After one-hour of police procedural chasing the Tooth Fairy we’re given 30 minutes with the character who is supposed to be a monster.
Tom Noonan’s Francis Dollarhyde is humanised and is all the scarier for that humanisation. He is a real person, flesh and blood.
He even has a semblance of normality before he is overcome with a jealous, murderous rage.
One of the most affecting parts of Manhunter is when Dollarhyde, who has just slept with a blind woman who cannot see his facial disfiguration, places her hand over his mouth as he stares, silently sobbing. It’s almost tender.
Manhunter was the beginning of Mann’s working relationship with Italian cinematographer Dante Spinotti (he has gone on to earn further acclaim with Mann on The Last of the Mohicans and The Insider while also being nominated for an Oscar for L.A. Confidential).
Spinotti said:
“There’s nothing in Manhunter… which is just a nice shot. His (Mann’s) plan is all focussed into conveying that particular atmosphere, whether it’s happiness or delusion or dissolution or love or romanticism or tension or fear.
“Every shot and every camera move, every angle and every piece of editing is studied in order to convey that particular moment in a very exact way.
“Michael explained to me what he liked about the use of the colour green, it’s a situation that sometimes we mixed with some purple and magenta.
“And I introduced the idea of the romantic, the deep romantic blue that we use for the romantic part of the story.
“What was really extraordinary in that film was the way Michael uses any element of the set dressing like props or elements of design, tabletop objects, the colour of the wallpaper, the shape of the armchair, any single element on the set is controlled and selected by Michael and then framing the camera in order to convey a sense of danger and potential violence that relates to the human mind.”
When looking at Manhunter the temptation would be to analyse the climactic finale shootout at the Tooth Fairy’s home — a blaze of bullets and jump cuts set to Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. There are different frame rates and camera speeds used to create a sense of confusion, unease and chaos.
But it’s the audience’s introduction to Hannibal Lecktor (Mann changed the spelling of Lecter’s last name from the book) which shows the devil is in the detail.
Here’s Spinotti again:
“At some point the detective, who has had some mental problems in his past after his first encounter with Dr Lecktor, looks round the cell and he sees some of Dr Lecktor’s objects.
“Pencils, the sink and his books and there’s some purple violet there, so this very straight long-lens shot, across these elements, very symmetrical, very simple and you have this weird colour all of a sudden that represents Peterson’s sickness, his fear of going into something dramatic again.
“Peterson runs out and goes out in the grass, we shot the grass with a very strange prism that we look for to decompose the shape of this grass and make it come out with some weird reflections which is what he looks at because he feels in himself this mental strain.”
As for Cox’s Lecktor — he’s a much more real villain than Hopkins’ overly affectatious (and much parodied) genial version.
Cox feels like a killer with an understated and small role. There’s no ‘fava beans and a nice Chianti’ line. Instead Cox with chilling affability, asks for Graham’s home phone number.
Cox loosely based his performance on Scottish serial killer Peter Manuel who murdered at least 7 people in the late 1950s.
Speaking in 2017 Cox said:
“I based my guy on a killer who existed in Scotland in the late 50s, this guy called Peter Manuel who actually conducted his own defence.
“He was really very, very urbane and sort of normal but he was a serial killer, it was kind of the normality I wanted.
“Evil, real evil is something that is so scarily normal that it becomes really nasty.
“If you see Ted Bundy and you hear them interviewed there’s something more prosaic about them which makes them more scary. “
At its core Manhunter is a film about a cop catching a killer, but it’s 80s setting and style — at the hands of Mann and Spinotti — make it so much more.
It’s deep and unusual and experimental and it will get in your mind too.
Further reading:
