Manhunter (1986) is Michael Mann’s crime thriller adapted from Thomas Harris’s 1981 novel Red Dragon. A retired FBI profiler is drawn back to hunt a serial killer the press calls the Tooth Fairy. The film is best remembered as the first screen appearance of Hannibal Lecter, here spelled “Lecktor” and played by Brian Cox, five years before Anthony Hopkins made the role famous. It flopped on release, but its cool, color-coded style and its focus on forensic work later made it a cult favorite and a major influence on crime television.
At a glance
| Release date | August 15, 1986 (US) |
| Director | Michael Mann |
| Writer | Michael Mann (screenplay) |
| Based on | Red Dragon (1981 novel) by Thomas Harris |
| Starring | William Petersen, Kim Greist, Joan Allen, Brian Cox, Dennis Farina, Stephen Lang, Tom Noonan |
| Runtime | 120 minutes |
| Rating | R (US) |
| Budget | $14 million to $15 million |
| Box office | $8.6 million (US) |
| Franchise | Hannibal Lecter series (remade as Red Dragon in 2002) |
Plot summary
FBI profiler Will Graham (William Petersen) retired after catching the brilliant killer Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox), who nearly killed him. His old boss, Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina), asks him to come back and help find the Tooth Fairy, a killer who has murdered two families, one in Birmingham, Alabama, and one in Atlanta. Graham promises his wife he will only look at evidence. Then he walks the crime scenes and tries to think like the killer, a gift that frightens him. To get back into that mindset, he visits Lecktor in his cell and asks for his insight, and Lecktor quietly begins working against him.
Alongside the investigation, the film follows the killer himself, Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan), a lab worker in St. Louis. His tentative relationship with a blind co-worker, Reba McClane (Joan Allen), brings out a fragile human side that makes him even more unsettling.
Spoiler section: the ending
Graham realizes the killer must have seen the families’ home movies, which leads him to the St. Louis film lab where Dollarhyde works. Dollarhyde abducts Reba after misreading her friendship with another co-worker. Graham, Crawford and the police race to his house, and Graham crashes through a window to stop him. In the shootout, Dollarhyde wounds Crawford and shoots two officers before Graham kills him. Graham then returns home to his family.
Production and behind the scenes
Producer Dino De Laurentiis changed the title from Red Dragon after his production Year of the Dragon flopped in 1985. Petersen has said the change was also meant to avoid any suggestion that it was a martial arts film. Mann called the new title “inferior,” and Cox has called it “bland.” David Lynch was considered as director but turned it down. De Laurentiis wanted a star such as Richard Gere or Mel Gibson as Graham. Mann had seen Petersen in To Live and Die in L.A. and championed him instead. John Lithgow, Brian Dennehy and the director William Friedkin were among those considered for Lecktor. Mann kept the role deliberately short because the character was so charismatic that he “wanted the audience almost not to get enough of him.”
Cinematographer Dante Spinotti used color to signal mood. Cool blues mark Graham’s family life, and greens and purples hint at something wrong. Joan Allen prepared for the role of Reba with the New York Institute for the Blind, learning to walk through the city blindfolded. Noonan had been bodybuilding for his role and noticed that he intimidated the crew, so he took separate flights and stayed in separate hotels from the rest of the cast. When Mann couldn’t get permission to film on a plane, the crew bought tickets on a flight from Chicago to Florida and shot the scene with equipment checked as hand luggage.
Release and reception
Manhunter opened in 779 U.S. theaters on August 15, 1986. It took $2.2 million on its opening weekend and $8.6 million in total, ranking 76th for the year. Because of problems at the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, its UK release was delayed until 1989. Reviews were mixed. Many critics thought Mann’s pastels, glass-brick architecture and synthesizer-heavy soundtrack were too much. The New York Times mocked his “taste for overkill,” and the Chicago Tribune‘s Dave Kehr said that style drained the film of credibility. In France it won the Critics Prize at the 1987 Cognac crime film festival.
Its reputation rose over the following decades. Salon called it the best film in the Lecter series, The Independent called it “the most aestheticised film of the 1980s,” and the film now holds an 82% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. A director’s cut was released on DVD in 2000, and the theatrical and director’s cuts came out together on Blu-ray in 2016.
Legacy and influence
The film’s attention to forensic detail has been cited as an influence on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which also starred William Petersen, and as a precursor to Millennium, The X-Files and films such as Seven. Petersen’s haunted, sympathetic Graham helped change the image of the screen FBI agent. None of the cast returned for Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), adapted from Harris’s next Lecter novel, and Anthony Hopkins replaced Cox as Lecter. In 2002, Brett Ratner adapted the same novel again as Red Dragon, with Edward Norton as Graham and Hopkins as Lecter. Spinotti returned as its cinematographer.
Trivia
- The film spells the character’s name “Lecktor,” not “Lecter” as in the novel.
- The word “manhunter” appears in Stephen King’s influential 1981 Washington Post review of Red Dragon.
- Dennis Farina had made his acting debut in Mann’s Thief (1981) and appeared in several episodes of Mann’s Miami Vice. Kim Greist had also worked on Miami Vice.
- To simulate bullet impacts in Dollarhyde’s kitchen, Mann threw glass jars across the set so they would shatter where he wanted them.
- Mann and Spinotti shot Noonan with an elaborate chest tattoo, as in the novel, but felt it looked wrong in the finished film.
- Mann attended a 25th-anniversary screening at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre in March 2011.
Related links
- Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham (characters)
- Hannibal Lecter series
- The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Red Dragon (2002)
- Michael Mann (director)
- Brian Cox, William Petersen and Tom Noonan (cast)
- Thomas Harris (author)
