Remembering Tom Noonan, Whose Performance in ‘Manhunter’ Is the Greatest Portrayal of a Psycho Killer in Movie History
Considering all the horror movies I’ve seen, I’m a pretty easy jump scare. I can sit through the degraded slasher-film trash of the week, and when that formula shock cut arrives, synced to a bombastic music cue, I’m gullible enough to get goosed.
That said, there are only three times in my life when I’ve seen a movie that chilled me to the bone of primal fear. The first one was “Carrie” in 1976. That incredible finale, when Amy Irving’s Sue is reaching down to Carrie White’s grave and Carrie’s blood-stained hand pokes out of the rubble, made me literally stand up out of my seat in terror. The next time I got scared on that level was my first viewing of “Psycho,” which didn’t happen until a few years after I’d seen “Carrie.” I could feel the fear factor of the shower scene ripping a hole in my soul.
Both of those moments were jolts. They are, to me, the two greatest jolts in cinema history, but they’re still powerfully visceral and kinesthetic. But the third time I had that experience, where a movie so terrified me I felt almost too scared to stay in the theater, it was a very different thing. It was the scene where Tom Noonan, who died Wednesday at 74, first appears as the serial killer of Michael Mann’s extraordinary “Manhunter.”
Noonan’s killer is unnervingly tall, with a stocking mask over the top half of his head, strands of gray-blond hair poking out the back. He has thick lips, one of them scarred, that curl into a leer. Clad in a long silk shirt that’s dark blue with blobs of white, he stands next to a victim he has abducted — a trembling sleaze from a tabloid newspaper — whom he has epoxied to a wheelchair. After tearing off the blindfold that’s glued to the victim’s eyelids, he stares down at him, and at us, and says, “Here I…am.” And we behold.
He wants his victim to look at photographs (of his murders), which he’s clicking through on a slide projector. “Do you see?” he says. The voice — this is part of the terror — is far from what we were expecting. It’s not an ominous voice. It’s quiet and weirdly neutral, almost delicate in its staccato insecurity; it’s the sound of someone whose emotions are totally divorced from his actions. And at that moment, listening to this unhinged freak, you forget every psycho killer you’ve ever seen in a movie.
Because they were mere movie characters. This, on the other hand, is what one of these people really looks like and sounds like. And this is just what it might feel like to be in his clutches. For this is no mere villain. This is a sick puppy who will do…anything. And that, watching “Manhunter” for the first time, was the primal terror I experienced. I felt like I was in that wheelchair, waiting to be confronted with a horror beyond description.
I first saw “Manhunter” at a preview screening the week it was released, in August 1986, and I’d never seen anything like it. I still haven’t. “Manhunter,” originally entitled “Red Dragon” (the name of the 1981 Thomas Harris novel on which it’s based; the studio slapped on that schlock title), is rightly thought of as “the original ‘Silence of the Lambs’.” It’s the movie that introduced Dr. Lecter, who is played with sinister impishness by Brian Cox. But it’s an even greater film than “The Silence of the Lambs.” To me, it’s the greatest thriller ever made. And Tom Noonan’s haunting performance is a huge part of what makes it so memorably unnerving.
Standing at a distance, we get to know the character he’s playing, a photo-lab technician named Francis Dollarhyde, who lives in an eccentric ramshackle river house, who worships the moon (he’s got giant posters of it in his dankly lit living room), and who thinks that he’s the Red Dragon, an avenger who will “change” people by slaughtering them into figures who will want him. He has been murdering families in different parts of the country. (He travels to them in his van.) He’s an utter depraved psycho. But he is also a visibly damaged, oddly complicated human being. Lecter, tracing Dollarhyde’s moves from his prison cell, calls him “a very shy boy.” You feel that in Tom Noonan the giant shrinking violet.
Michael Mann wrote and directed “Manhunter” with a masterful clinical gliding techno lyricism. He staged a labyrinthine detective story as a hypnotic ’80s rock psychodrama, with songs like Shriekback’s “This Big Hush” and the Prime Movers’ “Strong as I Am” used as seductively as any Scorsese needle drop. One of the ways that Mann departs from the book is the characterization of Dollarhyde, who the director says he based, in part, on a killer he got to know. In collaborating with Mann, Noonan, a New York stage actor (he was in the original Off Broadway production of Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child” in 1978), knew precisely what he was doing, even though he was cavalier about landing the role.
According to a story Mann tweeted out this week, Noonan nearly blew his audition by getting irritated at having to wait around for an hour-and-a-half. After the audition, he slipped out without talking to Mann, who had wanted to meet with him. They finally did meet, and Mann told Noonan that he thought he was “scary,” and was curious to know how the actor achieved that. Noonan said: by being scared. That, in a way, is the key to his performance. Noonan’s Dollarhyde is physically overwhelming when he wants to be, yet he’s tangibly vulnerable, and the fear he feels is threaded through the violence he inflicts. He lives on the dark side of the moon (the film’s soundtrack quotes that Pink Floyd classic), where he’s trying to fill the void with blood.
“Manhunter” is a head-spinning forensic mystery about the hunt for this man. It was really the first forensic movie thriller, with William Petersen living and breathing the role of FBI agent Will Graham, who tracks down homicidal predators by entering their mindset. As he gets to know Dollarhyde through a fantastic jigsaw of clues, and the film ushers us into Dollarhyde’s lair, Tom Noonan takes us into his fractured being. The performance is as delicate as a veil, as cutting as a razor’s slash.
I went through a period of watching “Manhunter” over and over again (it’s one of my three favorite films), and what I came to appreciate is that every moment of Noonan’s acting is possessed by something uncanny. The scene where he first speaks to Reba (Joan Allen), the blind woman who works in the photo lab (“Take my word for it. I’m smiling”); the scene where he brings her to a veterinarian’s operating theater so that she can feel the heartbeat of a tiger who’s being put under sedation, and as Dollarhyde closes his eyes in private rapture we realize the tiger is him; the moment when he’s so enraged that he grabs the sheet plastic glued to a dashboard and tears it off with one hand; and the momentous shootout at the end, set to Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (the one rock ‘n’ roll song as insane as Dollarhyde), where he moves his lanky body like a ballet dancer of survival.
Tom Noonan had a rich and varied career. He built and ran a small black-box theater in New York’s East Village called Paradise Factory, where he wrote and staged plays, like “What Happened Was…” and “Wifey,” both of which became independent films (“What Happened Was…” won the grand jury prize at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival). He made his presence felt in many films (like “RoboCop 2” and “Synecdoche, New York” and “Heat”) and TV series (like “Law & Order” and “Louis” and the “Paper Hearts” episode of “The X-Files”).
I got to meet him once, at a 1991 party for Jim Jarmusch’s “Night on Earth,” where he was nice as pie (though it was still, I confess, a little bit like meeting Francis Dollarhyde). When I told him how much I loved his performance in “Manhunter,” he was taken aback, as if the film wasn’t really all that. But I think that was just his way of being modest. And it was still relatively early in the long life that “Manhunter” would have. The movie is 40 years old now, and my perception is that more and more people have discovered it, have entered its heady realm of saturnine mystery. At the pivotal moment when Dollarhyde is scalded by a delusion of betrayal, he feels the Red Dragon taking him over, and he says, with mournful defiance, “Francis is gone. Francis is gone forever.” Yes. But Tom Noonan’s performance in “Manhunter” will live on.
That said, there are only three times in my life when I’ve seen a movie that chilled me to the bone of primal fear. The first one was “Carrie” in 1976. That incredible finale, when Amy Irving’s Sue is reaching down to Carrie White’s grave and Carrie’s blood-stained hand pokes out of the rubble, made me literally stand up out of my seat in terror. The next time I got scared on that level was my first viewing of “Psycho,” which didn’t happen until a few years after I’d seen “Carrie.” I could feel the fear factor of the shower scene ripping a hole in my soul.
Both of those moments were jolts. They are, to me, the two greatest jolts in cinema history, but they’re still powerfully visceral and kinesthetic. But the third time I had that experience, where a movie so terrified me I felt almost too scared to stay in the theater, it was a very different thing. It was the scene where Tom Noonan, who died Wednesday at 74, first appears as the serial killer of Michael Mann’s extraordinary “Manhunter.”
Noonan’s killer is unnervingly tall, with a stocking mask over the top half of his head, strands of gray-blond hair poking out the back. He has thick lips, one of them scarred, that curl into a leer. Clad in a long silk shirt that’s dark blue with blobs of white, he stands next to a victim he has abducted — a trembling sleaze from a tabloid newspaper — whom he has epoxied to a wheelchair. After tearing off the blindfold that’s glued to the victim’s eyelids, he stares down at him, and at us, and says, “Here I…am.” And we behold.
He wants his victim to look at photographs (of his murders), which he’s clicking through on a slide projector. “Do you see?” he says. The voice — this is part of the terror — is far from what we were expecting. It’s not an ominous voice. It’s quiet and weirdly neutral, almost delicate in its staccato insecurity; it’s the sound of someone whose emotions are totally divorced from his actions. And at that moment, listening to this unhinged freak, you forget every psycho killer you’ve ever seen in a movie.
Because they were mere movie characters. This, on the other hand, is what one of these people really looks like and sounds like. And this is just what it might feel like to be in his clutches. For this is no mere villain. This is a sick puppy who will do…anything. And that, watching “Manhunter” for the first time, was the primal terror I experienced. I felt like I was in that wheelchair, waiting to be confronted with a horror beyond description.
I first saw “Manhunter” at a preview screening the week it was released, in August 1986, and I’d never seen anything like it. I still haven’t. “Manhunter,” originally entitled “Red Dragon” (the name of the 1981 Thomas Harris novel on which it’s based; the studio slapped on that schlock title), is rightly thought of as “the original ‘Silence of the Lambs’.” It’s the movie that introduced Dr. Lecter, who is played with sinister impishness by Brian Cox. But it’s an even greater film than “The Silence of the Lambs.” To me, it’s the greatest thriller ever made. And Tom Noonan’s haunting performance is a huge part of what makes it so memorably unnerving.
Standing at a distance, we get to know the character he’s playing, a photo-lab technician named Francis Dollarhyde, who lives in an eccentric ramshackle river house, who worships the moon (he’s got giant posters of it in his dankly lit living room), and who thinks that he’s the Red Dragon, an avenger who will “change” people by slaughtering them into figures who will want him. He has been murdering families in different parts of the country. (He travels to them in his van.) He’s an utter depraved psycho. But he is also a visibly damaged, oddly complicated human being. Lecter, tracing Dollarhyde’s moves from his prison cell, calls him “a very shy boy.” You feel that in Tom Noonan the giant shrinking violet.
Michael Mann wrote and directed “Manhunter” with a masterful clinical gliding techno lyricism. He staged a labyrinthine detective story as a hypnotic ’80s rock psychodrama, with songs like Shriekback’s “This Big Hush” and the Prime Movers’ “Strong as I Am” used as seductively as any Scorsese needle drop. One of the ways that Mann departs from the book is the characterization of Dollarhyde, who the director says he based, in part, on a killer he got to know. In collaborating with Mann, Noonan, a New York stage actor (he was in the original Off Broadway production of Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child” in 1978), knew precisely what he was doing, even though he was cavalier about landing the role.
According to a story Mann tweeted out this week, Noonan nearly blew his audition by getting irritated at having to wait around for an hour-and-a-half. After the audition, he slipped out without talking to Mann, who had wanted to meet with him. They finally did meet, and Mann told Noonan that he thought he was “scary,” and was curious to know how the actor achieved that. Noonan said: by being scared. That, in a way, is the key to his performance. Noonan’s Dollarhyde is physically overwhelming when he wants to be, yet he’s tangibly vulnerable, and the fear he feels is threaded through the violence he inflicts. He lives on the dark side of the moon (the film’s soundtrack quotes that Pink Floyd classic), where he’s trying to fill the void with blood.
“Manhunter” is a head-spinning forensic mystery about the hunt for this man. It was really the first forensic movie thriller, with William Petersen living and breathing the role of FBI agent Will Graham, who tracks down homicidal predators by entering their mindset. As he gets to know Dollarhyde through a fantastic jigsaw of clues, and the film ushers us into Dollarhyde’s lair, Tom Noonan takes us into his fractured being. The performance is as delicate as a veil, as cutting as a razor’s slash.
I went through a period of watching “Manhunter” over and over again (it’s one of my three favorite films), and what I came to appreciate is that every moment of Noonan’s acting is possessed by something uncanny. The scene where he first speaks to Reba (Joan Allen), the blind woman who works in the photo lab (“Take my word for it. I’m smiling”); the scene where he brings her to a veterinarian’s operating theater so that she can feel the heartbeat of a tiger who’s being put under sedation, and as Dollarhyde closes his eyes in private rapture we realize the tiger is him; the moment when he’s so enraged that he grabs the sheet plastic glued to a dashboard and tears it off with one hand; and the momentous shootout at the end, set to Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” (the one rock ‘n’ roll song as insane as Dollarhyde), where he moves his lanky body like a ballet dancer of survival.
Tom Noonan had a rich and varied career. He built and ran a small black-box theater in New York’s East Village called Paradise Factory, where he wrote and staged plays, like “What Happened Was…” and “Wifey,” both of which became independent films (“What Happened Was…” won the grand jury prize at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival). He made his presence felt in many films (like “RoboCop 2” and “Synecdoche, New York” and “Heat”) and TV series (like “Law & Order” and “Louis” and the “Paper Hearts” episode of “The X-Files”).
I got to meet him once, at a 1991 party for Jim Jarmusch’s “Night on Earth,” where he was nice as pie (though it was still, I confess, a little bit like meeting Francis Dollarhyde). When I told him how much I loved his performance in “Manhunter,” he was taken aback, as if the film wasn’t really all that. But I think that was just his way of being modest. And it was still relatively early in the long life that “Manhunter” would have. The movie is 40 years old now, and my perception is that more and more people have discovered it, have entered its heady realm of saturnine mystery. At the pivotal moment when Dollarhyde is scalded by a delusion of betrayal, he feels the Red Dragon taking him over, and he says, with mournful defiance, “Francis is gone. Francis is gone forever.” Yes. But Tom Noonan’s performance in “Manhunter” will live on.