Do you think the wide releases of August 2016 are dismal? Consider this: exactly 30 years ago — August 15, 2016, presuming you live within a time zone relatively close to my own New York — audiences could stroll into a multiplex and do an opening-day double-feature of David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Michael Mann‘s Manhunter. Holy cow.
Because the present is just so very bad in so many ways, let’s pull that classic defense mechanism of looking towards the past. Despite (or perhaps because of) being an early work, Manhunter stands as a focal point in Mann’s oeuvre for both its substance and style — style, of course, is substance in this case — and in that way becomes unshakable for any fan. I don’t know if this has ever been explored better than in a video essay composed by Matt Zoller Seitz and Aaron Aradillas for the Museum of the Moving Image in 2011, as part of a Mann-centered series entitled “Zen Pulp.” That title will make sense once you watch the piece — which I’d fully recommend. Again: this offers an entirely more comprehensive way of approaching the first and, according to some who will really stress the point, best Hannibal Lecter picture. The embed doesn’t work on our site, so you’ll just have to click here in order to take a look.
Follow this with a pair of interviews where Lecter himself, Brian Cox, shares his thoughts on the role and its legacy; after that is a clip (starting at about 3:30) wherein the great Tom Noonan, the actor behind Manhunter‘s terrifying villain, offers a hugely amusing and, ultimately, less-than-flattering recount of his time working with Mann. (I say “less-than-flattering” because, I don’t know, “what else can I say to get myself in trouble” is a funny note to strike.) And then there are more general appreciations of the supercut variety, in which a percussive procession of clips are set to recognizable tunes — nothing you haven’t seen before, per se, but well-done and, no less, enjoyable in that immediate way Mann’s films tend to be. No, that isn’t the same video posted back-to-back. Some people just really love Heat.
See them below: