We start 1991 not in January, but in February. Partly because it just happened to work out that way. And partly because 1991's movie year - full of legends, beauty and the Beast and Thelma & Louise and JFK and Paris is Burning and Soapdish - can be said to center around the February box office smash that became a home video sensation, with enough heat to win Best Picture a year and a month after its initial release. Yes, yes: The Silence of the Lambs.
The film has an interesting pedigree for a blockbuster and Oscar winner. Based on a pulp paperback thriller, The Silence of the Lambs follows FBI trainee Clarice Starling as she hunts down a serial killer who skins his female victims; in her mission, she consults with the imprisoned murderer-psychiatrist-cannibal-genius Hannibal Lecter, who plays his own mind games with her. The director is Jonathan Demme, who by this time had become more known for his critically-acclaimed comedies like Melvin and Howard and Married to the Mob, though he initially broke through with exploitation pictures for Roger Corman, such as Caged Heat and Crazy Mama. The stars are Jodie Foster, a former child star who, with her Oscar-winning turn in 1988's The Accused, graduated into Serious Adult Actor, and Anthony Hopkins, a Welsh actor more known to the US for serious prestige work like The Lion in Winter or 87 Charing Cross Road. Together with writer Ted Tally, they made what could have been a lurid thriller and turned it into a hit with critics and audiences - and an enduring cinema classic.
Oh, yes, classic. We don't like to think of anything made after the 1960s as a classic, but it's been 35 years, I think we can say it, and The Silence of the Lambs more than qualifies, if just for how ubiquitous the film's iconography has become. Yes, the book series by Thomas Harris was already popular, and Michael Mann adapted Red Dragon into Manhunter in 1986, but it's the success of The Silence of the Lambs that gives us a four-film franchise, two television series (Hannibal and the short-lived Clarice), a musical parody (Silence! The Musical), decades of references (Zootopia 2 just last year paid homage), and even an "unconventional biography" (Brian Raftery's Hannibal Lecter: A Life, published just this February). Even during the film's first month of release, you could feel it: Foster and Hopkins presented the writing awards at the Academy Awards for 1990, just one month after The Silence of the Lambs came our, and were introduced with great fanfare and greeted by loud applause. When the VHS came out in October, it became the most rented video in the country. When the Academy Awards for 1991 were held the next year, the film became the third (and, so far, final) to win The Big Five: Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Screenplay (adapted, in this case). That's a lot of momentum to carry for a year, but it had the goods.
And to think, in some places it played alongside these films:
