"I do wish we could chat longer, but I'm having an old friend for dinner."
"It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again."
"I ate his liver with some fava beans and nice chianti."
Many quotes became favorites within the pop culture lexicon in the early 1990's thankx to a most unlikely Best Picture Oscar winner called The Silence of the Lambs, based on the 1988 Thomas Harris novel of the same name. That last quote in particular is still thrown out there at times, especially with the noise Anthony Hopkins, as Dr. Hannibal Lecter, makes afterwards. The first psychological thriller (and some would even categorize this, I think somewhat incorrectly, as a horror film as well) to win the top Oscar prize, this film bucked the trend of Best Picture winners coming out towards the end of a calendar year. It was released into theaters rather quietly in February of 1991, and was in fact available for rental and for sale on home video by the time the Oscars took place in 1992, which made this also the first Best Picture winner to be available for public ownership at the time it won. The film made history in one more way as well upon winning as it took home the "Big Five", becoming only the third film in history (and the last one to date) to win Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay. Let's take a look at The Silence of the Lambs. Oh, but since I haven't said this in awhile, let me warn you in advance that these blogs include a full movie synopsis, so there are spoilers ahead.
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Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is running outdoors at the FBI training facility in Virginia when she is summoned to meet with Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) of the Behavioral Science Unit. Crawford hopes Starling can be successful in convincing Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a former psychiatrist now imprisoned for several murders and cannibalism, to aid the FBI in catching a serial killer currently on the hunt known as "Buffalo Bill", who kills women and then skins them. Clarice accepts the offer and goes to Baltimore to meet with Frederick Chilton (Anthony Heald) at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Chilton gives Clarice the rundown on Lecter, and the do's and don'ts of talking to him, advising her to only pass him paper, no pencils or pens or staples or paper clips, and to only use the sliding drawer for transfers. Also, don't get close to the glass. Like Crawford had also told her, do not at all deviate. Before Clarice goes in to see Hannibal, she sees a photo of a nurse who was a prior victim of Hannibal's because she got too close. We don't see the photo, but Chilton goes into graphic detail of the damage done and emphasizes that Hannibal's pulse never raced during any of the attack, "...even when he ate her tongue." Clarice is rather taken aback, but bucks up and goes in, convincing Chilton (who's lasciviously hitting on her the whole time) to stay behind.
Clarice slowly heads down the hallway, passing sickos in cells along the way who all lust after her, until she arrives at a special glass-enclosed cell with Lecter standing inside, ready for the visit. Hannibal and Clarice verbally feel each other out cordially. She admires the drawings he has all over the walls, to which he remarks he has a very good memory. Clarice hands the questionnaire she'd like him to fill out into the transfer drawer. Hannibal takes it but rebuffs giving her any information, so she leaves. As she does, one of the other prisoners, Miggs, flings semen at her, which freaks her out and rallies the rest of the inmates. Hannibal yells out for Clarice to come back, and she does so right against the glass where Hannibal stands right on the other side. He more or less apologizes for the sickening display of Miggs and decides to tell her to seek out an old patient of his, spelling out the name "Mofet".
Clarice does some research from what Hannibal told her at the end of their meeting and receives a call from Crawford, who informs her that Miggs, the inmate who flung his semen at her during the visit, was killed by Hannibal. Clarice tells Crawford that she's tracked down a Your Self Storage outside of Baltimore, since Hannibal had said something about "your self". She checks the place out and discovers a storage room had been paid 10 years in advance to a Hester Mofet. She pries open the room and ultimately finds a severed head amongst the items inside.
Clarice returns to Hannibal, entering after enduring a heavy rainstorm. Hannibal passes her a towel through the transfer drawer, which she accepts and thanks him for. Hannibal smells her blood from a cut leg, then drops hints about a connection between that severed head and Buffalo Bill. Hannibal will help further, but in return he wants to be transferred to a cell elsewhere away from Chilton.
Meanwhile, a woman returns from food shopping and before entering her home, sees a man struggling to get furniture into his van. The woman offers to help him, but winds up assaulted and kidnapped. We learn later this woman is Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith) the daughter of a U.S. senator. In the days that follow, Clarice and Crawford forensically check a body that had washed ashore, which has postmortem injuries that follow Buffalo Bill's pattern. Clarice notices something in wedged in the victim's throat, and it is removed and discovered to be a cocoon, which could not possibly have gone in there so deeply by itself. Clarice brings the cocoon to an entomologist, who cuts it open to reveal it is a "death's-head moth", which comes from Africa and therefore must be homegrown by someone in the U.S. The scene then cuts to a camera touring through a basement, where we see underground rooms full of mannequins, fabric, and moths. It's our first look at Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) and his lair, as well as hearing the cries for help from a woman who is down a well.
Clarice goes to visit Hannibal again, with paperwork for a deal to transfer him to another cell for his help. This deal, drawn up by Crawford, is actually bogus. When Clarice arrives at the hospital, Chilton demands to know why she has continued to visit Hannibal and is withholding the information from the visits. She tells him to take it up with her superiors. Clarice sees Hannibal and tells him he'll get a transfer to Plum Island, complete with an hour a day of supervised beach and ocean time daily, if they can capture Buffalo Bill and save Catherine Martin with his help. Hannibal gives her information, but only in return for personal information from Clarice about her own life. Through all of this, Clarice learns Bill is not a "real" transsexual, just someone who wants a new ID since he'd been turned down for sex-change operations by several doctors. Hannibal also receives the Buffalo Bill case file through the transfer drawer. Chilton is recording the entire conversation and after Clarice leaves, he goes to Hannibal and tells him that he checked into this so-called deal, and it doesn't exist. However, he's drawn up a deal to transfer him to Memphis if he gives info to some other federal agents of his, Chilton's, choosing. As he's making this offer to Hannibal, we see a pen that Chilton has left unsupervised. Hannibal eyes it.
Upon arriving in Memphis, Hannibal meets with federal agents and the senator who's daughter is being held by Bill. Hannibal alternately repulses the senator with crude comments, and gives information about Buffalo Bill, saying his real name is Louis Friend. Chilton signs the transfer paperwork, but does so with someone else's pen because he can't seem to find his own...
Clarice learns of the transfer and visits Hannibal's new cell. She found out about the "Louis Friend" name and already determined on her own that it's an anagram for "iron sulfide", or "fool's gold". Hannibal and Clarice share more information until Chilton arrives and has Clarice removed. As she's leaving, Hannibal calls out and gives her back the Buffalo Bill case file that he received from her in Baltimore, and the transfer here is made through the cell bars. Hannibal rubs a finger over one of Clarice's and bids her farewell. Later, during delivery of dinner, Hannibal is cuffed to the cage as the food is brought in, but escapes from the cuffs using a piece of Chilton's pen that he swiped back in Baltimore. The two guards are beaten and bloodied. A while later, agents on the ground floor of the building begin to realize something's wrong, and they hear what sounds like a gunshot while the elevator is on the 5th floor where Hannibal is housed. The agents eventually make their way up to find one of the guards crucified against the cell, and Hannibal gone. The second guard is on the ground, bloodied almost beyond recognition, but still breathing. The guard is wrapped in a towel and placed onto a stretcher, then brought downstairs on the elevator. During the trip down, blood is seen dripping from the elevator roof, and the agents determine Hannibal must be hiding up there.
The elevator reaches the ground floor and the wounded guard is rushed into an ambulance and on the way to the hospital. As the ambulance heads off, the agents check the elevator from up above and see a body lying on top of the elevator. They call out to "Hannibal" and even shoot a bullet into the leg, but the body doesn't flinch. From inside the elevator, the roof hatch is opened and a body hangs down in view of the agents. We don't see the face since our view is from behind. The agents don't see the face either...because the face is gone. Cut to the ambulance, where the "wounded officer" rises, tears off the face of the second guard that is actually being used as a mask, and reveals himself to be Hannibal, just about to kill the ambulance staff and finish his escape.
(Just for the record, that above series of scenes is why I decided to remind everyone at the top of this blog that there are spoilers ahead, because when the movie viewer seeing this for the first time realizes that Hannibal is in the ambulance, and when he tears off the face to reveal his own, it is a once-in-a-lifetime legitimate "HOLY SHIT!" moment that very few movies have the ability to give people.)
Clarice analyzes the written information that Hannibal has given her in the Buffalo Bill case file and determines that Buffalo Bill knew his first victim. She travels to the victim's hometown and visits the family home, and learns that Bill is a tailor, and the reason he's skinning his victims' corpses is to make a "suit" with the skins. She phones Crawford to share the information, and he alerts her that they've figured this out as well and are on the way to the home of Bill, who's real name is Jame Gumm. Clarice also talks to other people who knew the victim and finds out that Gumm worked for a Mrs. Littman, and gets her address. Gumm, meanwhile, is dolling himself up to look female as he dances to an 80's song, not realizing in the process that his captive has captured Gumm's dog in the well. She threatens to harm the dog, which angers Gumm greatly, but as he's about to get a shotgun to apparently kill her, an alarm goes off signaling someone is at the door.
Cameras alternate between Gumm in the basement, and the outside of Gumm's house in Illinois where Crawford and the FBI agents are about to storm the residence. There's no answer at the door so they decide to go in. They do so, but find the house empty. Meanwhile, Gumm opens the door of the house he's actually in, and there is Clarice innocently asking if Mrs. Littman lives here. Gumm introduces himself as Jack Gordon and tells her she moved out a couple of years ago, but invites her in since he thinks he has the number of one of her relatives. As he fiddles through a pile of business cards, Clarice notices the house full of thread and plastic wrap, and some moths flying around. She realizes this is Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumm and draws her gun, but Gumm runs off. Clarice nervously goes through the house and into the basement, finding Martin in the well and telling her she'll be right back, to which Martin just screams a lot and calls her a lot of names. (Throughout this entire movie, Catherine Martin is so very unlikable. I almost wished Bill would've killed her just to shut her up.) Clarice opens a room and sees a decomposed body buried in sludge in a bathtub, which I'm assuming was the corpse of Mrs. Littman, and just as she sees this and realizes what she is looking at, the lights go out.
The next several minutes are very unnerving as we view Clarice in a green light, which is actually her stumbling around in pitch black with her gun drawn in full view of Gumm's night vision goggles, including an incredible few seconds of Gumm's hand reaching out and almost touching Clarice's face. Gumm raises his gun to the back of Clarice's head and cocks it, but Clarice hears this and fires her gun several times at Gumm, killing him.
Soon afterward, Crawford and the FBI agents arrive and escort Clarice and Catherine out. Time passes, and we're at the FBI Academy graduation party, where now-Special Agent Clarice Starling gets a phone call from none other than Hannibal Lecter. He's at an airport in Bimini and he promises Clarice that he will never come after her, and he hopes she'll do the same. She tells him that he knows full well she cannot do that. Hannibal finishes the call saying he'd love to chat more, but he's having an old friend for dinner. Hannibal hangs up the phone and follows Frederick Chilton, who has just stepped off a plane and down the road.
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Can you imagine this film having been done with Gene Hackman as Hannibal and Michelle Pfeiffer as Clarice? It almost happened, but both of them wound up leaving the early stages of the project because they found the subject matter too graphic and uncomfortable. Things turned out for the best. Debuting in theaters on, of all days, Valentine's Day of 1991, the movie was an instant success with critical acclaim and strong word-of-mouth. The movie stayed in theaters for most of the year, finally leaving theaters in mid-October with a $130M+ domestic gross against its modest $19M budget.
As mentioned earlier, The Silence of the Lambs took home five Oscars, and they were the "Big Five". Hopkins as Best Actor, Foster as Best Actress, Jonathan Demme as Best Director, Ted Tally for Best Adapted Screenplay, and the Best Picture award (besting Beauty and the Beast, Bugsy, JFK and The Prince of Tides). Two more nominations for Best Film Editing and Best Sound Mixing did not result in Oscar wins. Today, the film is considered a classic, with Hannibal Lecter even named the #1 Movie Villain of all time by the American Film Institute. It's surprising to learn with all the accolades for Hopkins and his character that of the 118 minutes of running time for this movie, Hannibal is only seen on screen for a total of 16+ minutes. A sequel followed 10 years later called Hannibal, with Hopkins reprising his role as Dr. Hannibal Lecter but Julianne Moore taking over the role of Clarice Starling. Foster, along with Demme and Tally, wanted to part of the sequel, especially with the direction that the book wound up taking with the Hannibal and Clarice characters (not all elements of which were repeated in the film). Most people, myself included, would just rather forget the book and movie sequel ever were made. Instead, just dine on The Silence of the Lambs, a true modern classic. Just remember to not get too close to the glass.
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