Manhunter
Tags: dark, gothic, murder, neo noir, cult, violence, atmospheric, good versus evil, insanity, suspenseful, sadist, home movie

Plot synopsis:
Will Graham (William Petersen) is a former FBI criminal profiler who has retired because of a mental breakdown after being attacked by a cannibalistic serial killer, Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox) whom he captured. Graham is approached at his Florida home by his former FBI superior Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina), who is seeking help with a new serial killer case. Promising his wife (Kim Greist) that he will do nothing more than examine evidence and not risk physical harm, Graham agrees to visit the most recent crime scene in Atlanta, where he tries to enter the mindset of the killer, now dubbed the "Tooth Fairy" by the police for the bite-marks left on his victims.
Having found the killer's fingerprints, Graham meets with Crawford. They are accosted by tabloid journalist Freddy Lounds (Stephen Lang), with whom Graham has a bitter history; Lounds' paper had run photographs of Graham taken secretly while he was hospitalized. Graham pays a visit to Lecktor, a former psychiatrist, in his cell and asks for his insight into the killer's motivations. After a tense conversation, Lecktor agrees to look at the case file. A little later, Lecktor contrives and manages to obtain Graham's home address by deceit during his phone privileges.
Graham travels to the first crime scene in Birmingham, Alabama, where he is contacted by Crawford, who tells him of Lounds' tabloid story on the case. Crawford also patches Graham through to Frederick Chilton (Benjamin Hendrickson), Lecktor's warden, who has found a note in Lecktor's personal effects. Reading it, they realize it is from the Tooth Fairy, expressing admiration for Lecktor—and an interest in Graham. Crawford brings Graham to the FBI Academy at Quantico, where a missing section of the note is analyzed to determine what Lecktor has removed. It is found to be an instruction to communicate through the personals section of the National Tattler, Lounds' newspaper.
The FBI intends to plant a fake advertisement to replace Lecktor's, but they realize that without the proper book code the Tooth Fairy will know it is fake; therefore, they let the advertisement run as it is, and Graham organizes an interview with Lounds, during which he gives a false and derogatory profile of the Tooth Fairy to incite him. After a sting operation fails to catch the killer, Lounds is kidnapped by the Tooth Fairy (Tom Noonan). Waking in the killer's home, he is shown a slideshow of William Blake's The Great Red Dragon paintings, along with the Tooth Fairy's past victims and slides of a family the killer identifies as his next targets. Lounds is forced to tape-record a statement before being set on fire in a wheelchair and killed, his flaming body rolled into the parking garage of the National Tattler as a warning.
Graham is told by Crawford that they have cracked Lecktor's coded message to the Tooth Fairy—it is Graham's home address with an instruction to kill the family (ending with "Save yourself. Kill them all," revealing that Lecktor believes Graham would find the Tooth Fairy). Graham rushes home to find his family safe but terrified. After the FBI moves Graham's family to a safe house, he tries to explain to his son Kevin why he had retired previously.
At his job in a St. Louis film lab, Francis Dollarhyde—The Tooth Fairy—approaches a blind co-worker, Reba McClane (Joan Allen), and ends up offering her a lift. They go to Dollarhyde's home, where Reba is oblivious to the fact that Dollarhyde is watching home-movie footage of his planned next victim. She kisses him and they make love. Dollarhyde is confused by this newfound relationship, though it helps suppress his bloodlust. Just as Graham comes to realize how much the Tooth Fairy's desire for acceptance factors into the murders, Dollarhyde watches as Reba is escorted home by another co-worker. Mistakenly believing them to be kissing, Dollarhyde murders the man and abducts Reba. When she calls him Francis, he tells her: "Francis is gone. Forever."
Desperately trying to figure out a connection between the murdered families, Graham realizes that someone must have seen their home movies. He and Crawford deduce where the films were processed. They identify the lab in St. Louis and fly there immediately. Dollarhyde has been casing the victims' homes through home movies, enabling him to prepare for the break-ins in extreme detail. Graham determines which employees that match their profile information have seen these films and obtains Dollarhyde's home address, to which he and Crawford travel with a police escort. At Dollarhyde's home, Reba is terrified as he contemplates what to do with her. As he struggles to kill Reba with a piece of broken mirror glass, police teams assemble around the house. Seeing that Dollarhyde has someone inside with him, Graham lunges through a window. He is quickly subdued by Dollarhyde, who retrieves a shotgun and uses it to wound Crawford and kill two police officers. Wounded in the firefight, Dollarhyde returns to the kitchen to shoot Graham, but misses because of his injuries and is killed himself when Graham returns fire. Graham, Reba, and Crawford are tended to by paramedics before Graham returns home and retires permanently.

Review: Recent thrillers are clearly lacking in the character development that made movies like Manhunter and Silence of the Lambs so good.
Years after that, as a freshman in college, I was managing a video store when a woman came in looking for the recently released `Silence of the Lambs.' She said she knew William Petersen from childhood and told me that he was in THE first Hannibal the Cannibal movie.
Walking out, I found myself asking whether I liked it better than `Manhunter.' These comparisons can get very silly because not only am I basing my impressions on a book, but also a previously filmed version and a closely related `sequel.' Best method: let each stand alone, THEN decide if either was successful.
In the process it opens up some old mental wounds that were born out during his last action out in the field...Before the gargantuan success of Silence of the Lambs, where the name Hannibal the Cannibal moved into pop culture, and before director Michael Mann became a named auteur often referenced with relish by hungry film students; there was Manhunter, Michael Mann's brilliant adaptation of Thomas Harris' equally brilliant psychological thriller, Red Dragon.
Visually, thematically and narratively it remains a clinical piece of cinema, a probing study of madness that dares to put a serial killer and the man hunting him in the same psychological body, asking us, as well as William Petersen's FBI agent Will Graham, to empathise with Tom Noonan's troubled Tooth Fairy killer.
There's a scene in a supermarket where Will is explaining to his son about his dark place, where "the ugliest thoughts in the world" live, a stunning sequence of acting and a showcase for Petersen's undoubted talents.Newcomers to the film and Mann's work in general, could do no worse than spend the ten minutes it takes to watch the Dante Spinotti feature on the disc.
And it's this last point that touches on that which makes Manhunter so clever and in my opinion better than the book itself.Everything important in Manhunter is subtly hinted at so it's left up to the audience to infer: Graham's ability to track serial killers (he's half-way there himself); relatedly, Graham's motives for choosing Lounds to lure the killer (whether he was aware of them or not); Dolarhyde's disgust/insecurity at his own physical appearance (and the root of his desire to kill).
Again, it's to Mann's, and the actor's credit that, by the time his three scenes are done with, we have an implicit feeling as to what may be driving this Lecktor as well as an uncomfortable liking for him.Three stand-out sequences to look for: 1) the 'walk-through' of the tooth-fairy's letter through the forensic process.
From the credits I discovered it was from Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, a book I had read.William Peterson plays the enigmatic FBI agent Will Graham, who has left the job after almost being killed by Hannibal Lechter, but who is now coaxed back to help catch a killer who is murdering whole families in different locations in the United States.I enjoyed Brian Cox as Lechter.
Perhaps because I saw Manhunter before Silence of the Lambs, I prefer Cox to Anthony Hopkins in the role.The Freddy Lounds character is the stereotypical reporter you love to hate.
A psychopath is not necessarily a killer - a psychopath is simply someone who does not feel for other human beings, which is often why the psychopath killers of this world were in fact convincing actors - for example Geoffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson.So when we analyze the profiles of true psychopathic serial killers, we can quite clearly see that Cox plays the better Lecter than Hopkins.
Saying that it is above average and a solid serial killer/cop thriller.Manhunter was based on the book Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, the first film about Hannibal Lector.
This was Michael Mann's baby-steps into theatrical film making after television work, and led he to direct excellent films like The Last of the Mohians, Heat, the Insider and Collectial.The plot of film was Will Graham (William Petersen), an expert profiler, who is called out of retired by the FBI to investigate a serial killer, the Tooth Fairy, who had brutally murdered two families in the Deep South of America.
FBI Agent Will Graham (William Petersen, you have seen him on CSI) has captured the diabolical Dr. Hannibal Lecter or Lecktor (Brian Cox), nearly losing more than just his mind in the process.
Joan Allen (The contender), Dennis Farina, Kim Greist and Stephen Lang co-star in this shocking thriller directed by Michael Mann and adapted from the novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris.
Michael Mann's 1986 adaption of the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon now titled Manhunter is without a doubt one of the best thrillers (or can I say horror movies) ever made (I say horror because what else do you call movies about serial killers).
Brian Cox, who played Lecter or actually Lecktor, does great with his performance also but this movie isn't about Lecter so he's only in it for 10 minutes at the most but does great with that time, his Lecter doesn't come off as being the embodiment of evil like the Hopkins performance but his Lecter is more of a sly, manipulitive character.
The movie does leave out some things about Dollarhyde's past but I think they were not needed because Tom Noonan did enough on his part, but the ending does change a lot but then again after creating such a compelling character as Will Graham (one of my fave characters ever...right up there with William Sommerset from Se7en) I didn't want him to get mutilated and almost killed like in the books ending.
And the director's cut does add some more depth to the characters and the new scene at the end where Graham visits the family that was to be Dollarhyde's next victim's is really good, it's not all dialogue like "you saved our lives" and all that s**t, it's played in the character's face....there needed to be no dialogue for it.
Manhunter is an amazing film, we as the audience are not treated as fools, not everything is fully explained or laid out, it contains no throw away dialogue in case we forgot what is going on, all is told through breathtaking imagery and acting, I do not have to see the gruesome details of horrific crimes in order for me to have an emotional response, like the classic shower scene from Hitchcock's Psycho a lot of what we see is implied, at first we only see a silhouette of the attacker we hardly see any blood, we don't see the knife puncture flesh, yet it is still disturbing and horrific.William Petersen excels as the main agent working to track down this vicious serial killer nicknamed The Tooth Fairy, and Brian Cox gives a truly chilling performance..
(the movies seem to need a happier ending, don't they?).This Hollywoods' mania to twist the plots around, spurned me to READ The Silence of the Lambs - sure enough,the film's polished rendition left a lot to be desired compared to the written counterpart.Then I realised that someone had made a film of Red Dragon too.
sorry to all the people that think ralph fiennes (still looking for someone to explain how that translates to ray fine, it has got to be a gimmick, and please don't give me a load of replies about it being some English/whatever bit, he is English/whatever and his family seems to be the only one that pulls this) but, tom noonan nailed the red dragon.i read the book, i saw both movies, and i still think tom noonan nailed it.so manhunter isn't a literal translation of the book.
With a deadline imposed, the next full moon, and no clear leads, FBI chief Jack Crawford, with some desperation, pulls a retired agent out of the field.That retired agent is Will Graham (a compelling William Peterson) who is faced with the unenviable task of having to go and meet Dr Hannibal Lektor in order to try and gain some insight into the mind of the killer (the 'Tooth Fairy') they are chasing.For my money the scenes between Graham and Lektor are every bit as good (if not better) than those between Starling and Lector in Silence of the Lambs.The key difference here is that Michael Mann never allows the tension of fear to ebb away between Graham and Lektor.
Resentful of society, and brutalised by a childhood which sadly the film does not touch on (for that you need the book), Tom Noonan brings depth and even sympathy to a character who has already murdered ten people before the film even starts.Better or worse than Silence of the Lambs, the comparison makes no difference to Manhunter.
It certainly has little to do with Hannibal the cannibal and concentrates on FBI specialist Will Graham tracking down a serial killer dubbed " The Tooth Fairy " Michael Mann directs in a minimalist 80s style which I'm afraid appears somewhat dated viewed today .
Though to be fair to Mann he does manage to bring a depressing and bleak atmosphere to the movie without ever having to resort to blood and gore and gimmicks unlike Ridley Scott did with HANNIBAL If you like murder mysteries or films that have a typically mid 1980s feel then I can certainly recommend MANHUNTER.
Will Graham succeed in stopping the killer before the next full moon?"Manhunter" is an engaging thriller by Michael Mann based on the novel of Thomas Harris that has become famous years later with the movie by Anthony Hopkins.
Without further ado, and not too many spoiler moments, I'd like to comment on the performances of both movies' stars and then encourage the reader to rent Manhunter and see for himself.William Petersen, as FBI profiler Will Graham, is intense, sometimes gritty and others, sublime.
"Manhunter", a thriller that initially introduced the world to Hannibal Lecter (rebranded Lecktor here), is a rather aloof serial killer suspense drama, murderous in its tension but icy in its pathos.William Petersen plays Will Graham, a retired FBI profiler lying low after a gruesome attack by cannibalistic murderer Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox).
In "Red Dragon", Lector is a minor character (it's even spelled "Lecktor" here, and he only has about three scenes in the movie, and they are effective enough, because he's not the key character.) Obviously, the character was expanded in "Silence of the Lambs" and its sequel "Hannibal", prequels, "Red Dragon" (based on the same source novel) and "Hannibal Rising" so people watching this film wanting more Hannibal, and wanting Anthony Hopkins to play him.Watch this movie pretending none of those other films ever existed, and that Hopkins never played the role, and you'll enjoy the film.William Peterson (who later went on playing a very similar character in "CSI") delivers as a profiler who gets too close to his work, just getting burned by the insanity he has to try to comprehend without being swallowed up by it.
The remake "Red Dragon" shoe-horns Lector into the film where he doesn't need to be, really.The scenes with the Dollarhyde character are truly uncomfortable to watch, which is the point, I guess, particularly when he seduces the blind girl and then wants to kill her in a jealous rage.
Not at all coincidental.If Cox had been given the time and the acting latitude that Tony Hopkins was handed on a gold platter, who knows how much better he could have been as Lecktor.Noonan's character was somewhat frightening in the scene with the Tattler reporter, but compared to the average bad guy in Criminal Minds, he could be mistaken as the Easter Bunny.Let's face it.
First of all I would like to say, that in my opinion "Manhunter" way better than "Red Dragon".Brian Cox as Dr. HannibalLecktor acts less scary on the first view than Anthony Hopkins does, but Cox makes Lecktor more cold and calculated a psychopath without any emotions.
Because if he has, additional sequels are a waste of time.And having witnessed "Hannibal Rising", I confess I believe the character exhausted; but that's another review.Here, let me just say that it was good to see Mann's film again recently, to return to the series' cinematic origins, to get a clearer perspective of the Lecter character as he was originally conceived.What makes the Lecter character fascinating in "Manhunter" is that he is pure genius become pure sociopath.
In fact so great, that Michael Mann should take on the challenge making remakes of 'Silence of the Lambs' and 'Hannibal' as well.Brian Cox is the true Hannibal Lecter!
Brian Cox performs horribly as the evil supergenius Hannibal Lector, but that may be a result of the fact that I had already seen Anthony Hopkins' performance of the same character (one of the best performances I have ever seen on film) before I saw Manhunter.
It is easy to see why he got the role because he exhibited many of the same qualities in this film.Michael Mann (Heat, Miami Vice, Collateral) does a good story in this genre and I really enjoyed his writing and directing of this film.Veteran actor Brian Cox made a great Hannibal Lecktor, and was so much more of what a serial killer should be that later reincarnations of the character.A really interesting movie that was only weakened by the fact that is was in the style of the 80s..
This film is based on the first book entitled "Red Dragon" regarding Dr. Hannibal Lecter (of "Silence of the Lambs"), written by Thomas Harris.In "Manhunter", director Michael Mann manages to create some tension, but not consistently.
The plot is good and manages to hold its own, however you never quite believe Brian Cox as Lecter, especially after seeing the part so brilliantly played by Anthony Hopkins.The acting from William Petersen, Dennis Farina, Kim Greist, Tom Noonan and Joan Allen is good, however, in what turns out to be a solid mid-eighties drama-thriller.Saturday, June 16, 1991 - Television.
It can not be bettered !An  idea would be to get Thomas Harris to write a new novel about how Will Graham caught Lecter in the first place, then get Michael Mann to film that.Anyway back to the movie and what amovie , a near masterpiece.
A slow boiling psychological thriller in which Michael Mann pulls off a clever trick in not showing us the Tooth Fairy until a good way through the film at which point you are bursting to see him.And is'nt Tom Noonan the perfect Francis Dolarhyde.
the first film to feature the now infamous Hannibal Lecter, it focuses on FBI manhunter Will Graham (Petersen) as he tries to catch the killer Francis Dollarhyde aka the 'tooth fairy' (Noonan).
Adapted from the book Red Dragon: The Pursuit of Hannibal Lector, Manhunter follows FBI agent William Graham as he solicits the help of Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (note the spelling of his name in this film as opposed to the later two).
Other than The very good performance of William L Petersen, and Michael Mann's slick direction, this film is more of a TV movie of the week than a real thriller.
Manhunter is the first film in the Hannibal Lecter movie franchise and it was directed by Michael Mann and it is also written by him based on the book by Thomas Harris, called Red Dragon.The story of MANHUNTER is cool.
Let me break it down for you: When asked to investigate a killer known as "The Tooth Fairy", FBI profiler Will Graham comes out of retirement to lend his talents to his case, but in doing so he must confront the specter of his past and meet with a jailed killer who nearly counted amongst the victims.MANHUNTER focuses on the forensic work carried by the FBI to track down the killer and shows the long-term effects that cases like this have on Graham, highlighting the similarities between him and his quarry.The film features heavily stylized use of color to convey this sense of duality and the nature of the characters' similarity has been explored in academic readings of the film.MANHUNTER was the first film to introduce serial killer Hannibal Lecer, who would later appear in the 1991 critically-acclaimed film, The Silence of the Lambs, directed by Johnathan Demme, the Ridley Scott sequel, "Hannibal", released in 2001, the 2002 remake / re-imagining of "Manhunter", directed by Brett Ratner, "Red Dragon" and the black sheep, critically disappointing released in 2007, "Hannibal Rising", directed by Peter Webber.The actors are amazing.
The ending was terrible, Will Graham was not fully explained, Hannibal Lector was not scary, it wasn't as exciting as the book, and it didn't show the origin of the tooth fairy and how the Red Dragon painting could talk to him.
The first movie about Hannibal Lecter, based on a book "Red Dragon".
Petersen, Cox, Farina, and Noonan give splendid performances, and the overall feel is better (in my opinion) than "Red Dragon", the remake of this film.
The narrative of the Harris books is a vortex upon which more and more people, beginning down that transformative path (sometimes with the best of intentions), do, in fact, transform from humans into something other than human (except for Will Graham and Dr. Bloom).Where Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal and Red Dragon all fail is that these three movies continue to keep us at a distance.
However, I personally think "Manhunter" is a well-made, underrated suspense film - the forgotten entry in the Hannibal Lecktor/Lecter series, and a movie that should be seen regardless of your blind love for all things Hopkins..
MANHUNTER is a too underrated film,another great work from Michael Mann and a much better film than HANNIBAL and RED DRAGON,and it's even a better film than the famous THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS...see this film!.
Like many people, I saw Silence of The Lambs first and discovered Manhunter during the ten year void before Hannibal, anxious to see another Lecter film.
I've watched it over and over since then, and it gets even better each time around.For this movie alone I have finally accepted Brian Cox as Hannibal.