Silence of Lambs at 30: Still Crazy After All These Years

By Steve Evans

Having seen more than 15,000 films in a lifelong love affair with the cinema, I can say to a certainty that only four have truly terrified me and one of those is The Silence of the Lambs, released 30 years ago today. Like Alien (1979), Jaws (1975) and Psycho (1960), it is difficult to convey the sensation of dread that Silence of the Lambs invokes in the first-time viewer. You have to experience it for yourself.

Most people know the picture. Fewer know that the film runs 2 hours and 18 minutes or that Anthony Hopkins is on-screen for a mere 16 of those minutes, yet his presence is felt constantly. B-movie producer Roger Corman, who gave director Jonathan Demme his start in the business, makes a cameo as the director of the FBI. A professor of mine in grad’ school went to college with Ted Levine, who plays serial killer Buffalo Bill. The professor told me it wasn’t a huge acting stretch. Michelle Pfeiffer turned down the role of Special Agent Clarice Starling, claiming the material was too violent. This, from the woman who co-starred in Scarface (1983). Gene Hackman was originally slated to direct and play a supporting role as Detective Crawford, the part that ultimately went to Scott Glenn. But Hackman pulled out and Demme took over in the director's chair.

Hindsight being 20/20, what makes Demme such an interesting choice to direct Silence of the Lambs is he got his start making sleazy, sexist women-in-prison flicks in the early 1970s, but in Silence he created one of the greatest feminist motion pictures of all time. As Clarice, Jodie Foster is ogled by men within the first 10 minutes of the movie and continuously thereafter until the end credits. She works for the FBI, one of the most patriarchal organizations in existence. She elegantly rebuffs the repugnant advances of a criminal psychologist in the insane asylum where she interviews Hannibal Lector and is met with further indignities by the inmate-patients in the dungeon-like hospital. And, of course, she is in pursuit of a monster who murders and skins women in order to become a woman himself within the twisted corridors of his pathology. Quite the ordeal. Yet Clarice prevails.

Let’s see…one other bit of trivia I can offer: in the climactic scene, when Buffalo Bill is stalking Clarice in a darkened room, he uses night vision goggles to observe her (the male gaze again) and you can see the shadow of his pistol on Clarice’s back – a revealing mistake that they were using green lighting effects and dialing down the aperture on the camera to make the room appear pitch-black (where there should be no shadows). A minor quibble from a film obsessive. C’est moi.

Certain crime stories and subsequent film adaptations like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are the direct descendants of The Silence of the Lambs. So enduring is the character of Clarice that CBS recently launched a television show centered around her FBI career. I’ve read the reviews and do not plan to watch it.

Silence also holds the distinction of being the last film – and only the third in history – to sweep the Holy Quintet of Academy Awards – best picture, director, actor, actress, and screenplay. The best picture win alone makes it unique among horror films.

Rich, multilayered and scary as hell, The Silence of the Lambs became an instant classic. So pull the cork on a nice Chianti, serve up some spicy buffalo wings and watch the film tonight with someone you love. It is, after all, Valentine’s Day.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2021 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

 

Ridin' a Carousel with Gerry and the Pacemakers

By Steve Evans

Famed composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein created the Broadway musical Carousel in 1945 when a little fellow named Gerry Marsden would have been three years old. The musical was adapted 11 years later into a major motion picture filmed in a stunning, ultra-widescreen process known as CinemaScope. Carousel also features, hands-down, the greatest composition to be heard in any American musical. It is the only song I know of besides Danny Boy that can leave strong men crying in their beer.

Gerry went on to form a band called The Pacemakers. He covered this great tune in 1963 when he was 21 years old and had just signed a contract with Brian Epstein, who by then had added a little band called The Beatles to his stable of groups under management.

Gerry and the Pacemakers never achieved The Beatles’ stratospheric heights of success, but they cut some damn-fine singles and You’ll Never Walk Alone is one of them.

Marsden died yesterday. He was 78.

Seek out the 1956 Hollywood adaptation of Carousel as well. It’s the best musical the studio system ever produced. An absolutely devastating cinematic experience.

The expression of encouragement in this song is so powerful it is almost overwhelming.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2021 by Stephen B. Evans. All rights reserved.

A nod to Murnau, who'd be 132 today

 By Steve Evans

Remembering F. W. Murnau, German expressionist director born on this day in 1888. He is perhaps most famous for directing Nosferatu (1922), the original Dracula film. For my money, Faust (1926), pictured here, is his masterpiece. It is an adaptation of Goethe’s famous tale of a kindly man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for curing his village of plague. Except nothing ever works out the way it’s supposed to. Stunning chiaroscuro cinematography, wild set designs and innovative special effects combine to create an eerie and irresistible film experience. Walt Disney shamelessly lifted several sequences for the Night on Bald Mountain climax of Fantasia (1940).

Murnau later immigrated to America and made three films before dying in Los Angeles in a car accident. His driver, a 14-year-old servant, crashed into a utility pole. Murnau was 42. More than a third of his cinematic output is lost to the ravages of time, but you can still see Nosferatu and Faust. And you should.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2020 by Stephen B. Evans. All rights reserved.

Hanging Out with D.A. Pennebaker

 By Steve Evans

When I met one of my idols about four years ago, documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, we talked for a bit about his film Monterey Pop, which chronicles the legendary rock music festival in the summer of 1967. It’s my favorite concert film, the template by which all others are judged. The vibe really resonates in my spirit. And the music is fantastic. Woodstock has flashier editing and offers marginally better sound. Gimme Shelter climaxes with an on-camera murder while the Stones crank out Under My Thumb. Zeppelin’s Song Remains the Same, while wall-to-wall with great performances, will clear out your sinus cavities and possibly pluck on your nerves due to the amateurish filmmaking and sloppy editing. Scorsese’s The Last Waltz is beautiful, but elegiac and at times melancholy. Demme’s Stop Making Sense has the coked-up freneticism and weirdness that were hallmarks of The Talking Heads in the mid-1980s. All are good, each in their own way, but….

Only Monterey Pop really nails the scene with its cinéma vérité style (sometimes referred to as “fly on the wall” – observing subjects as unobtrusively as possible). There are absolutely amazing moments peppered throughout this picture. We see that rock stars are as human as everyone else, with all their flaws and foibles, until they hit the stage and become transcendent. I find that fascinating.

The Mamas and Papas were unraveling as the event was happening, even as band leader John Phillips was producing the entire festival with famed rock impresario Lou Adler. The tension shows. John’s wife and fellow band member Michelle had been fired and rehired less than a year earlier after she was caught screwing Gene Clark, lead singer for The Byrds. Mama Cass was in unrequited love with fellow band member Denny Doherty, who also had a fling with Michelle before Monterrey Pop, which would be their penultimate appearance in concert as a group. Improbably, their performance is still a knockout. David Crosby makes political statements while onstage with The Byrds (Gene Clark had quit the band by then), dares censors to censor him, then later appears onstage with Stephen Stills in a set by Buffalo Springfield, a move that got Crosby fired from the Byrds soon after. Cutaway shots to the audience clearly show most of them are tripping balls & titties, and eating a lot of corn on the cob on a stick. In one of the outtakes, comedian Tom Smothers introduces Paul Simon by making a joke about his height. Simon is not amused. Janis Joplin and Ravi Shankar bring down the house with their respective sets. The Who and Jimi Hendrix aren't too shabby, either. Country Joe and the Fish act like they've just arrived from another planet. For background texture, you’ll see a parade of rock royalty roaming through the crowds and backstage. It's bittersweet. At least 7 of the musicians glimpsed in the picture would be dead in less than a decade. Otis Redding was the first to depart. Monterrey Pop made him famous. Six months later, he was dead in a plane crash. Many, many more have left us in the half century since.

I'm babbling about all this to express my love of documentary film, which to me is the best time capsule of all.

D.A. was generous with his time while we were hanging out at the University of Virginia’s Culbreth Theater. At the end of our conversation he declared me “family,” which was an honor only a true cinephile can fully appreciate. I was touched.

One of things we talked about was the challenge of condensing a three-day music festival into a fleeting 79 minutes and 22 seconds of documentary film. D.A. said the editing decisions were among the toughest of his career.  Technical problems in the wild, like film jamming in a camera or the sudden death of batteries in a tape recorder, rendered the footage of some of the bands’ sets unusable. Several of the groups were so stoned that they later objected to being included in the film. So they landed on the cutting room floor. D.A. sculpted miles of footage into a finished film, plus nearly two hours of outtakes left over, and he edited, but did not use, the complete performances of Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding, running about 45 and 20 minutes, respectively.

D.A. explained that because the project was originally planned for television on the ABC network and consequently the film had to run under 90 minutes to allow for commercial breaks, he had to make some difficult choices on what to include. ABC executives apparently were not prepared for what they would get. Jaws reportedly dropped when the finished film was screened. By the time they saw Hendrix humping his amplifier and setting his guitar on fire, the TV people decided to pass on broadcasting the picture. So Monterey Pop ended up getting the theatrical release it always deserved. It was heralded as an instant classic of the documentary form. But by the time the TV executives walked away from the project, it was finished and in the can. So much material had to be left out.

D. A. Pennebaker died last year in August. He was 94.

I was mulling these thoughts last night when I pulled my boxed set of the documentary off the shelf. Like a monkey playing with a bone in Kubrick’s 2001, it dawned on me that I have nearly 6 hours of material on discs, plus access to additional clips here and there online that could be downloaded.

I found the original Monterrey Pop set list for the entire 3-day festival posted on Wikipedia, song by song.

And then it hit me.

By Gawd, my weekend entertainment will be spent in my editing suite. I am going to disassemble the outtakes into individual clips, organize them into the proper sequence as originally performed and cut them together with optical transitions to smooth out the finished product. I have wondered for decades what it must have been like to attend that ungodly music festival. This is as close as I am ever likely to get. 

I don’t expect many or even a few to understand these obsessions of mine, but I believe D.A. would. We are, after all, family.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2020 by Stephen B. Evans. All rights reserved.