Another signature piece of 80s film making here from director Michael Mann and the first on-screen outing for Thomas Harris' Dr. Hannibal Lecktor.
Two families have been brutally murdered in their own homes a month apart. Jack Crawford of the F.B.I's behavioural science division has nothing and time is running out. He turns to the one man with a track record in finding and stopping this type of psychopath. The man who shot and killed the murderer Garrett Jacob Hobbes, the man who caught Hannibal 'The Cannibal' Lecktor, the now retired Will Graham. Graham was badly hurt in the capture of Lecktor and it's going to take everything he's got in him to get back into the hunt. Not only that, he's going to have to speak to his old enemy the doctor.
Francis Dollarhyde is obsessed with a painting by William Blake. He believes that the Great Red Dragon is inside him, that they are becoming one, but when Francis falls in love he begins to fight back. Will Francis be able to hold back the dragon? Can Graham find him before he strikes again or will a new family be part of his becoming?
William Petersen steps out again for Michael Mann, this time in the starring role, and although he seems a little posy he's not at all bad as he lays the ground work for his later role in CSI. Tom Noonan is towering and intense as the deranged killer. In the book, Dollarhyde is hugely introverted due to a facial disfigurement and although that's slightly missing from the movie Noonan's method puts across his shyness very well, in particular in the scene with the tiger. Brian Cox is the first of half a dozen or more to play Lecktor on film and TV around the world and he's by far the best. Unlike Anthony Hopkins' better known performances in the later films Cox doesn't play the pantomime villain, sniffing the air and giving knowing looks, but the unblinking cleanliness of the act gives the audience a real feeling of the malevolent inelegance behind the cannibalistic doctor's interaction with Graham. The white cell, the bars and the white uniform, whether intentional or not, will relate wonderfully with the scene with the sleeping tiger and add even more power to the doctor.
Actor Frankie Faison plays Lt. Fisk. He'll appear in 3 of the next 4 Hannibal films as Barney, the doctors jailer.
Michael Mann's fingerprints are all over this film. The wistful looks out to sea, the neon and electronic music, not to mention Petersen's awful pastel pink shorts, make it an archetypal 80s classic.
Brian Cox told a story on the BBC's Top Gear that when the part in The Silence of the Lambs was being cast his agent, whom he shared with Hopkins, didn't tell him about it. I also read that when Cox was filming this film Hopkins was playing Lear at the National Theatre and when Hopkins was filming as Lecktor Cox was playing Lear at the National. I wonder if it was the same agent messing with them...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091474/?ref_=nv_sr_1
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