THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS: 4K Blu-ray (Orion, 1991) Kino Lorber

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, imbued with 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 ever 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 principal 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 on route back 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. There’s more to life and art than those movies…or so I am told. A good ‘dumb’ movie is still a good ‘dumb’ movie. But I digress.

Besides, 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 years or so to be reminded of how perfectly affecting and 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!

Shot on 35 mm, Kino Lorber’s new to 4K effort takes its cue from work done by MGM on an existing scan from an OCN and supervised by Tak Fujimoto with HDR10 and Dolby Vision options. Predictably, overall resolution and detail advance, with even opticals looking smartly clean and crisp. The grit shows – appropriately so. The palette here is subdued with a cool slant that is in keeping with the original cinematography. Shadows are rich and atmospheric. This looks fabulous, but different from the Criterion SE Blu-ray from 2018, which was cribbing from a different master altogether. The Kino 4K gets a 5.1 DTS audio derived from the same mix done in 2009. There’s also an optional 2.0 DTS, replicating the original theatrical mix. The 4K gets a good - if not great - audio commentary by noted critic/historian, Tim Lucas. The rest of the goodies are housed on a standard Blu-ray derived from these newly minted 4K sources, adding the more than hour-long Inside the Labyrinth: Making of The Silence of the Lambs, the nearly hour-long The Silence of the Lambs: Page to Screen, and as girthy, Jonathan Demme and Jodie Foster: The Beginning, the 20-min. Understanding the Madness, 16-min. Scoring the Silence, and original making of featurette (barely 9 mins.). There’s also more than a half-hour of deleted scenes properly framed in their OAR, Tony Hopkins’ phone message, TV spots, teasers and trailers for this and Hannibal. Virtually none of the Criterion extras have survived the transition here. Not a deal-breaker, in my opinion. Kino has done some very honest heavy-lifting on this title and it’s well worth your coin. Very highly recommended!

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

5+

VIDEO/AUDIO

5+

EXTRAS

5+