THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS: Blu-ray reissue (Orion, 1991) Criterion
BEST PICTURE - 1991
It is impossible
to set aside one’s own appetite for liver and Fava beans without remembering
the good Dr. Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) and his affinity for whatever else might
be on the menu. Jonathan Demme’s The
Silence of the Lambs (1991) – a loose ‘follow-up’ to Michael Mann’s
C-budget thriller, Man Hunter (1986,
based on the novel by Thomas Harris) may be the most successful sequel in movie
history. Unequivocally, it remains a delectably hair-prickling excursion into
the mind of a sadist. In bringing this unrepentant flesh-eating physician to
life, Anthony Hopkins resurrected a movie career that, until this film, most
living in North America could barely recall. Let’s just go on the record here:
Sir Anthony is an international treasure; an actor’s actor with the chops and
pedigree to float several Lifetime Achievement Awards (though, oddly enough,
not a single one yet bestowed on him by the AFI – for shame!). Hopkins’
performance in The Silence of the Lambs
is a tour de force; a deep breath of malice for mankind while quietly expelling
his deliciously grotesque admiration for fledgling FBI agent, Clarice Starling
(Jodie Foster) whom he ultimately spars the indignation of his Ginsu. The mutual
fascination that develops between these sworn enemies is engrossing to say the
least. Yet, it fuels what is essentially an otherwise conventional
crime-solving narrative with an almost involuntary knee-jerk sexual friction.
Is Lecter in love with Clarice? Increasingly, in his own warped sense of amour,
this becomes our central and nauseating focus.
Clarice Starling
is very like the ‘little lost lamb’ so depicted in her own flashbacks of an
anxious childhood and more astutely accredited in the movie’s title; an
innocent, thrust into the midst of wolves – her male counterparts at the FBI,
including boss and mentor, Jack Crawford (played with subtle salacious
inferences by Scott Glenn) and with more odious transparency by Anthony Heald,
as Dr. Frederick Chilton; the despicably perverse curator of Baltimore’s
maximum security asylum for the criminally insane. Ted Tally’s screenplay draws
an unflattering, though remarkably clairvoyant parallel between all three of
these men in Clarice’s life; the influences they exert – or try to – on her
psyche and career, and, the commonalities they possess; namely, to claim her
for their own. Ironically, Hannibal Lecter is the only man capable of reading
Clarice Starling like a book; preying upon, but also showing a genuine compassion
for, her primal self-doubts. He appreciates her more when she lets the pretense
of her carefully honed cleverness slip, revealing honesty not yet jaded by its
tenure at the FBI.
The Silence of the Lambs is based on
Thomas Harris' 1988 novel of the same name. In galleys, it caught the interest
of Gene Hackman and Orion Pictures, the studio conspiring for $500,000 to
acquire the rights for Hackman, not only to direct, but also star. But producers also had to acquire the rights
to the name ‘Hannibal Lecter’ since it had first been used in Manhunter; still owned by that film’s
producer, Dino De Laurentiis. As Manhunter
had yet to acquire its cult following, and had – in fact – been a colossal box
office bomb, De Laurentiis freely lent the rights to Orion, perhaps forever
thereafter to regret his shortsightedness. Ted Tally was hired to adapt the
novel for the screen. Alas, midway through his first draft, Hackman withdrew
from the project without explaining his reasons. Without a star, financial
backing fell through. Nevertheless, Orion’s co-founder, Mike Medavoy encouraged
Tally to keep writing. Fortuitously, Medavoy’s replacement in the director’s
chair was Jonathan Demme. Ambitious to a fault and eager to please, Demme
signed on after reading the novel, his enthusiasm only continuing to ferment
and blossom after perusing Tally’s screenplay. In one of those rare instances,
Tally’s first draft remained pretty much intact with few revisions; production
green-lit by November with one of the shortest incubation periods of any movie
produced during the cost-crunching early-nineties.
Like Demme,
Jodie Foster’s participation was assured after she had read the novel. Demme,
alas, was not entirely certain she was right for the part. He would have
preferred Michelle Pfeiffer. As Pfeiffer found the subject matter too morbid
for her palette, Demme relented to cast Foster in her stead. As for Hannibal
Lecter; the director’s first choice had been none other than 007 himself - Sean
Connery. Like Pfeiffer, Connery felt the role a bad career move, leaving
relative unknown, Anthony Hopkins to step into Lecter’s shoes and appetite. Sir
Anthony had been something of a main staple in Britain since the mid-1960’s;
primarily known for his work in London’s live theater and a few supporting
roles in the movies that intermittently garnered high praise on both sides of
the Atlantic. And yet, despite his reputation as a consummate pro, Hopkins’
appeal failed to gel states’ side; his most prominent part, Sir Frederick
Treves in 1980’s The Elephant Man,
leaving little more than an afterthought in the public’s mind. Orion encouraged
Demme to pursue the likes of Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman for
the second lead. However, virtually all refused to partake of the exercise;
ditto for Demme’s two ‘other’ Brit-imports: Derek Jacobi and Daniel
Day-Lewis. Demme also faced re-casting
the part of Jack Crawford; the FBI’s Agent-in-Charge of the Behavioral Sciences
Unit at Quantico, Virginia. This had been originally slated for Gene Hackman.
Scott Glenn proved a noble ‘second’ choice; the actor immersing himself in the
atmosphere of the piece by studying John E. Douglas, the man on whom author,
Harris had modeled this fictional character.
Douglas gave Glenn a tour of Quantico and also allowed him access to
bone-chilling audio recordings made by serial killers, Lawrence Bittaker and
Roy Norris as their souvenir of the rape and torture of a 16-year-old girl. The
tapes so disturbed Glenn he openly wept, and eventually, was stirred to change his
liberal stance on the death penalty.
Principal
photography for The Silence of the Lambs
began on November 15, 1989 in Pittsburgh, with additional scenes made in West
Virginia. In a rare act of cooperation, Demme was granted restricted access to
shoot a few brief inserts at the actual FBI Academy at Quantico, with several
senior agents appearing as extras in the film. As principle photography neared
completion, composer, Howard Shore picked up his baton in Munich to record the
score, taking his cue from Demme’s intricate notes and specific instructions as
to the length, tone and placement of these cues. Shore’s score maintains an air
of advancing horror; falling somewhere between a simple little dirge and
elaborate requiem that perfectly plays on the audience’s impending sense of
dread and mounting anxiety for Clarice Starling’s safety – not, so it seems,
from Hannibal Lecter, but rather his copycat, Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine in a
thoroughly skin-crawling portrait as the “he
puts the lotion in the basket” serial killer).
The Silence of the Lambs begins its
narrative from Clarice Starling’s point of view; her awkward pursuit to become
the best criminologist within the FBI’s patriarchal infrastructure. Midway
through, this balance of power will shift; Lecter’s story overtaking the
narrative bloodlines as Clarice becomes further mired in her desperate attempt
to maintain pace with the morsels of truth strewn in her path. Intermittently,
we are also allowed access into Clarice’s fearless, though angst-ridden past;
her desire to be rid of early childhood traumas (the death of her father and
slaughter of spring lambs) and her curious relationship with Dr. Lecter – whose
fascination with her is only marginally creepier than that shared by Jack
Crawford, abnormally relishing Clarice being kept slightly off balance in his
presence. As portrayed by Jodie Foster, Clarice Starling is clever enough to
play the game, yet smart enough to know when and where the rules might be bent
to get exactly what she wants: the prestige and rank of an agent responsible
for getting this notorious serial killer off the streets.
Even more bizarre,
Clarice’s intellectual equal is Hannibal Lecter – aberrant, yet clear-headed.
Lecter’s mind games leave Clarice addicted and craving more insight into the
blackened recesses of a warped human heart and mind. Lecter abides. But he also
baits Clarice. And yet, he affords her invaluable clues that help unearth
Bill’s whereabouts before anyone else even suspects him of the disappearance of
a college girl. What follows is a distorted game of ‘cat and mouse’ and a
perilous race against time; Lecter, appealing to Clarice’s ego, plying her with
legitimate tips, although, perhaps, never expecting her to follow them through
to the end. It matters not to Lecter if Clarice finds Buffalo Bill in time.
What Lecter is after is his freedom; a chance to escape and avenge himself on
his tormentor these many years, Dr. Chilton – “the friend” he is “having
for dinner”…literally!
Our tale begins
with the Bureau’s Behavioral Science specialist, Jack Crawford pulling FBI
trainee and UVA grad’ Clarice Starling from her studies for a very special
assignment. It seems Clarice is on her
way; well…at least, to Baltimore’s ‘maximum security’ asylum to interview
Hannibal Lecter; by far, the most intellectually perverse inmate in their
otherwise devilish menagerie of pure psychopaths. Unlike most serial killers,
who keep mementos of their victims, Hannibal ate his, earning him the nickname,
Hannibal the cannibal. But Lecter may be useful in the Bureau’s latest
investigation of a copycat killer, crudely referenced as Buffalo Bill ‘because
he skins his humps’. Crawford needs insight into Bill’s mind. The matter
becomes all the more urgent as Bill’s recent spate of murders has resulted in
the disappearance of Senator Ruth Martin’s (Diane Baker) college-bound
daughter, Catherine (Brooke Smith). The asylum supervisor, Dr. Frederick
Chilton is himself a sadist who delights in the sublime torture of the inmates
in this freak show. Chilton flirts with Clarice before allowing her to descend
into the bowels of his institution where she does indeed come face to face with
evil incarnate. Hannibal Lecter is not about to publicly share his secrets –
that is, not without a little glimpse into Clarice’s psyche. His quid pro quo
psychoanalysis threatens to reveal far too much about Clarice’s haunted past.
Instructed by Crawford not to partake in any of Hannibal’s head games, Clarice
instead decides to gamble her own memories for Catherine Martin’s safe return.
But Hannibal
possesses an extraordinary mind. He chastises Clarice for her feeble attempts
to ‘dissect’ his brain. Curiously, after fellow inmate, Miggs (Stuart Rudin)
accosts Clarice by flicking semen in her face Lecter, who considers the act
degrading, offers Clarice the first big break in the case; a clue to a former
patient ‘Miss Moffat’, somehow indirectly involved with Buffalo Bill. Clarice
traces the name to a storage facility and discovers, among the many possessions
housed within, a man’s severed head submerged in a glass bottle of formaldehyde
with a rare sphinx moth embedded in its throat. Lecter helps Clarice profile
Buffalo Bill on the condition he will be transferred to another institution for
the remainder of his incarceration. To expedite this profiling, Crawford
authorizes Starling to offer Lecter a fake deal. Rather insidiously, Lecter seizes the
opportunity and mercilessly probes Clarice’s childhood recollections on the
murder of her sheriff/father when she was only ten years old. Chilton secretly
records this conversation and exposes Clarice’s betrayal to Lecter, offering
him an alternative ‘deal’. Lecter agrees and is flown to Memphis where he
verbally taunts the Senator with misdirection, suggesting Buffalo Bill’s real
name is ‘Louis Friend’ – an anagram for ‘iron sulfide’ (a.k.a. ‘fool’s gold’).
Desperate to
solve the case and save Catherine’s life, Clarice implores Lecter to reveal the
killer’s true identity to her. Instead, he promises everything she needs to
know is already in her case file, and further investigates Clarice’s memory,
awakening to the sound of spring lambs on a relative’s farm being slaughtered
for market. Clarice confides that sometimes she still hears that terrible sound
of death. Chilton intervenes in this latest interrogation, the police forcibly
removing Clarice from the room. Later that same evening, Lecter escapes, having
stolen a paperclip to loosen his restraints. He uses the police’s own pepper
spray to startle a guard before ruthlessly bludgeoning him to death; removing
the man’s face and placing it over his own. Lecter ensures the EMT’s will rush
him from the crime scene, presuming he is the officer, still barely alive and
in desperate need of their medical attention. Alas, en route to the hospital,
Lecter butchers these angels of mercy too. He vanishes into thin air.
Meanwhile,
Clarice analyzes Lecter’s annotations and concludes Buffalo Bill knew his first
victim personally. Bill – a tailor by trade – is killing women to stitch
together a dress made of real human skin. Clarice telephones Crawford with this
news. Regrettably, armed with his own false narrative, Crawford is too
preoccupied to listen, already en route to arrest the transsexual, James Gumb.
While Gumb is definitely the serial killer they are both after, Crawford has
misjudged the address – arriving at an abandoned home while Clarice simultaneously
turns up on the front porch of ‘Jack Gordon’, who she comes too late to realize
is James Gumb after discovering a live sphinx moth fluttering around the house.
Gumb lures Clarice to his multi-level basement, a dimly lit inner sanctum of
horrors where Clarice discovers the dress made of human skin and Catharine
Martin, naked, but still alive and being held against her will in a hollow
well.
Plunging the
windowless room into darkness Gumb, wearing a pair of night-vision goggles,
stalks Clarice through the labyrinth. She is near paralyzed with fear. At the
last possible moment, Gumb gives away his position directly behind Clarice by
cocking his gun; Clarice, retaliating, unloading her service
revolver into Gumb, sending him toppling to his bloody death through a
blacked-out window. For her valor, Clarice achieves the notoriety and respect
of her colleagues. She graduates from the Academy with top honors. Alas, at the
post-commencement party, Clarice receives a phone call from the one admirer she
did not expect; Hannibal Lecter – still at large and about to strike again on
the remote tropical isle of Bimini where Dr. Chilton’s plane has only just
landed.
In hindsight, The Silence of the Lambs can be viewed
as a transitional piece in American cinema; the watershed moment in our
post-post-modern storytelling when the more glossily told crime/thrillers of
yore gave way to the grittiest of uncompromising portraits of the criminal
element. Indeed, without ‘Lambs’ we might never have had Natural Born Killers (1994), or Se7en (1995) or Fargo (1996); perverse and nightmarish police procedural stories,
favoring the ruthlessness, deception and unbridled madness of their glorified
killer. Inherently, there is nothing wrong with this sort of movie, except that
Demme’s breakpoint has created something of a creative gestalt in Hollywood
these days, whereby virtually all like-minded narratives to have followed it
take their cue and are destined to copy ‘Lambs’ stifling bleak modus
operandi. Oddly enough, we warm to Hannibal Lecter, if not as likable, then
most certainly one of the most fascinating faces of evil ever to grace a movie
screen. This is partly due to Anthony Hopkin’s
uber-riveting performance; teeming with precisely the sort of criminal insanity
one would anticipate from a cannibalistic serial killer, yet queerly infused
with an underlay of congenial charm that burrows deep (forgiving the pun) under
our collective skin.
In 1991, The Silence of the Lambs was elevated
from its crime/thriller sub-genre by the fact nothing quite like it had ever
been seen on the screen before; the picture’s unnerving sense of genuine
realism as paralytic as it proved penetrating in all its skin-crawling dread. I
will depart a moment herein to account my own experience with this movie;
having agreed to go with friends to see it during its theatrical run, even
though I suspected it was not my cup of tea, only to have ‘said friends’ pull out at the last possible moment. Already at the
theater, I elected to see the picture alone and was, upon exiting the theater,
uncomfortably looking over my shoulder more than once en route to my parked car
in the lot behind the theater. The picture’s most disturbing impressions
gleaned from this opening-night experience have stuck with me ever since. Oft,
on this blog and elsewhere on movie forums, I get bashed for preferring movie
art of a higher calling; movies that can be re-seen and appreciated for their
multi-layers of meaning over time.
The Silence of the Lambs is not this
kind of movie. And yet, it remains so viscerally disturbing to me, I find
myself compelled to trundle it out once every five or so years to be reminded
of how perfectly affecting and afflicting brilliant it is. But it still creeps
me out. And this, I suspect is the reason for my admiration; for all that
Jonathan Demme, his cast and crew have wrought. But afterward, fava beans and
Chianti just never seemed to go together. Evidently Academy voters disagreed. The Silence of the Lambs went on to win
Oscars in all four of the major categories: Best Actor (Hopkins), Actress
(Foster), Director (Demme) and Best Picture – an artistic coup not seen in
Hollywood since Frank Capra's decidedly more ebullient masterpiece, It Happened One Night (1934). Today, ‘Lambs’
remains as disconcerting and authentic as the day it was made. Regrettably, in
our present age of opaque, menacing and ultra-violent entertainments it plays
as more par for the course than the standout from the lot – how deeply
depressing, indeed!
Criterion’s
Blu-ray re-issue of The Silence of the
Lambs marks a vast improvement over MGM/Fox Video’s release from 2008;
remastered in 4K with a superior bit rate and color balancing that has, at long
last, eradicated the unhealthy red lean that made flesh tones pink and basically
obfuscated all the subtle lighting techniques employed by cinematographer, Tak
Fujimoto. The image herein is refined, with natural-looking flesh tones and
film grain appearing far more indigenous to its source material. Age-related
artifacts are a non-issue, as before. Where this latest incarnation excels is
in the details. This is a razor-crisp presentation, extolling minute detail in
skin, hair and background information without ever appearing to have suffered
untoward DNR or artificial sharpening. By comparison, the color palette now
possesses a green slant. However, viewed alone, it looks about what I am thinly
able to recall from my movie-going experience so long ago; or rather, more
natural on the whole and likely closer to the way it did appear when projected
theatrically on film. So, good stuff here. The DTS 5.1 audio is magnificent,
capturing the suspense-laden atmospheric quality of the original sound mix.
Best of all are
the extras: not only do we get all of the previously released junkets and commentaries
that were part of the MGM/Fox Home Video releases, but Criterion has jam-packed
a second Blu-ray with hours of quality featurettes and documentaries, sure to
please fans of this movie. From 1994, we get the audio commentary featuring
Demme, screenwriter, Ted Tally, Hopkins and (in a rare incident of
participation) Jodie Foster, along with former FBI agent, John Douglas. On the
same disc as the movie, we also get a new interview piece with critic, Maitland
McDonagh plus nearly forty minutes of deleted scenes. The second Blu-ray houses
a 3-part, nearly hour-long documentary from 2005, produced by Laurent
Bouzereau. We also get Inside the
Labyrinth; the 2001 documentary by Jeffrey Schwarz that is superb and
comprehensive. Also, on tap: at just under an hour, an episode of Bravo’s Page to Screen (2002) and brief
featurettes on scoring the movie, and, entering the mind of a serial killer.
Finally, there is an all too brief storyboard piece. Criterion’s liner notes
contain an introduction by Jodie Foster and essays from critic, Amy Taubin and
author, Thomas Harris, as well as a Q&A featuring Demme. Mercifully left on the cutting room floor,
the genuinely morbid 5 cooking recipes Hannibal Lecter would approve. This
accompanied the tired ole MGM/Fox Blu-ray release. I shuddered then to think of
their protein content. Bottom line: The
Silence of the Lambs is a masterpiece; although, in a year where J.F.K., Beauty & The Beast and The
Prince of Tides were all Oscar-nominated, I confess, I had my ‘odds on’
favs that did not include ‘Lambs’ as the winner. Criterion’s
Blu-ray is the definitive edition in hi-def. You will want to own this one;
even it only gets played once every five years!
FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)
5+
VIDEO/AUDIO
5+
EXTRAS
5+
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