‘Manhunter: The Final Cut’ Shows Why Director’s Cuts Are Almost Never an Improvement. But It’s Still the Greatest…

If you’re a movie buff, a cinephile, or whatever else you want to call it (I called my 2016 memoir “Movie Freak”), one of the greatest pleasures to be had is when a film grabs hold of you and won’t let go. That’s happened to me a number of times, with movies like “Nashville” and “Carrie” and “Mean Streets” and “Sid and Nancy” and “Full Metal Jacket” and “Natural Born Killers” and “Boogie Nights.” I’ve been possessed by those films, driven to see them each of them over and over and over again, as if they were albums I was playing. (You can’t play an album too many times; same for a movie you love.) One of the supreme instances of that, for me, is Michael Mann’s “Manhunter.”

It’s a thriller I got addicted to, for a number of reasons. I couldn’t get enough of its look and atmosphere, its fascination and terror, its extraordinary villain, its moody Sherlock-Holmes-as-forensic-underground-man FBI hero, its music-drenched vibe of saturnine lyricism. It’s my favorite thriller of all time. There are days when I’ve thought it’s the greatest thriller ever made.

But then, I lost objectivity about “Manhunter” a long time ago. It’s a movie I never get tired of seeing because it speaks to me. So I wanted to say something about it on the occasion of its 40th anniversary, which is being commemorated by the small theatrical release (on July 24) of “Manhunter: The Final Cut,” a 4K restoration and director’s cut overseen by Michael Mann.

In addition to being, in my opinion, one of the great films of the last half century, “Manhunter” is also one of the most underappreciated. You’ll find almost no fans of Michael Mann who will say it’s their favorite Mann film. (That’s invariably “Heat” or “The Insider.”) The movie is based on “Red Dragon,” the 1981 Thomas Harris novel that was the author’s original serial-killer saga (it’s the book that introduced Hannibal Lecter), but you’ll find almost no one who thinks that the movie is as good as “The Silence of the Lambs,” the fabled screen adaptation of Harris’s 1988 sequel. (I adore both films but think “Manhunter” is greater.)

And there are viewers who have a problem with William Petersen’s performance as Will Graham, the FBI profiler who comes out of retirement to catch a serial killer by learning to think like him. Some people find Petersen mannered. I think he gives a spellbinding performance: inquisitive and implosive, poised on a blade of dread, charged with a turbulent undertow — and, in every sense of the word, cool.

But the cool factor is actually connected to why “Manhunter” has never found its rightful place in film history. When it came out, Mann had directed two previous features — “Thief” (1981), a small-scale hit, and “The Keep” (1983), a major bomb — but he was best known for being the executive producer of “Miami Vice” (where he was, in a way, the first celebrity showrunner), the ground-breaking cop series that was the true dawn of the age of quality TV. It was the first series ever to feel, at times, like a movie. Part of that was its style: the needle drops, the luxe but gamy tropical settings, the trend-setting look (the sport coats worn over pastel T-shirts, the stubble revolution) of its fashion-plate cop heroes. I dug all that stuff, though even as “Miami Vice” became the definition of a certain kind of pop-culture cool, it was also mocked as cheesy for that very reason.

“Manhunter,” with its synth score and postpunk songs, with Will Graham sauntering through crime scenes in his color-coordinated ties and jackets, was seen at the time — and is seen even more now — as being stylishly trapped in some 1980s bubble. Occasionally, Graham will drop a line like, “It’s just you and me now, sport.” There’s no denying that “Manhunter” feels like a movie from the ’80s. But so what? “Double Indemnity” feels like a movie from the ’40s. Mann’s stylish signatures in “Manhunter” aren’t so much dated as timeless; they create their own aesthetic. The cinematographer, Dante Spinotti, shot the movie in a unique way, so that it looks at once sensual and clinical: the magic hour given a flash of fluorescence. In this case, the film’s form and content are merged. “Manhunter” looks like a lush neon fever dream because it is so much a movie about seeing.

The film’s original release date was August 15, 1986. Here are a few thoughts on why I’m still watching it.

It was the first forensic thriller, and it makes that into a parable of how technology enmeshes us. We see the FBI do all kinds of things we’d never seen in a movie before (using infrared to peer beneath the markings of a felt-tip pen). And from the moment Will Graham enters a white-on-white bedroom splattered with geysers of dried blood, he fastens onto details that feel like they’re part of a science experiment. But what the cutting-edge-for-the-time technology really does is to create the sense of a controlled universe the killer is ripping through with his animalistic savagery. What’s special about “Manhunter” is that the film uses the forensics poetically, as the portal to a different consciousness.

It’s the most authentic portrayal of a serial killer — maybe the only authentic one — in cinema history. Tom Noonan, who plays the tall, strapping but shrinking-violet serial killer Francis Dollarhyde, who slaughters whole families on the night of the full moon, died in February of this year. I wrote a tribute to what I love about his performance, starting with the fact that the first time I saw “Manhunter” (at a preview showing the week it came out), it scared the holy hell out of me. Noonan, with his halting voice and his projection of rage fused with a leering superiority (Dollarhyde is the Red Dragon! You’re just a slug in the sun), created a true psychotic mentality (“You…owe…me…awe”), and the film places you right inside it. No movie I’ve seen — not “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer,” not the entertaining but gimmicky “Se7en” — has created the sense of damage that drives these sick puppies like “Manhunter” does. Dollarhyde kills because he’s haunted, and his looming scarred-lip figure haunts the movie.

Brian Cox plays the original Dr. Lecter, and he’s mesmerizing. None of us had heard of Brian Cox before, and he’s beyond brilliant. His Lecter is locked in a pristine white cell in a prison for the criminally insane, and from the moment Graham comes to visit him to get the old mind-set back, Cox’s face is extraordinary, the mouth grimacing like an open wound set off by his slick jet-black hair. With his indelible line readings, at once imperious and amused, Cox projects Lecter’s diabolical intelligence and sensory feelers (“That’s the same atrocious aftershave you wore in court”), his lying ingenuity (he uses a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum to jimmy a phone and get an outside line and then says, “Operator, I don’t have the use of my arms”), as well as his ghoulish intimacy with murder (“Have you ever seen blood in the moonlight, Will? It appears quite black”). It’s all consummately creepy and droll, but what Cox’s Lecter ultimately confronts the audience with is the shivery idea that homicide could be the expression of a higher state of being.

Why I feel so connected to William Petersen’s Will Graham. In our age of misinformation and competing narratives, we are all, each day, working overtime to figure everything out. We’re all trapped in the mystery. And that, to me, is what Petersen’s performance in “Manhunter” is really about. Graham isn’t just trying to solve a series of horrific crimes; he’s not just trying to save innocents. He’s trying to put an impossible collection of clues together so the world becomes a place of order again. Petersen makes that quest come through in the quietude of his voice, the rock-steady aggression of his gaze — and, in the most moving scene in the film, in the way Graham talks to his tween stepson, Kevin, standing before rows of cereal boxes in a supermarket as he explains how he lost his mind after capturing Dr. Lecter. It’s a scene about what can happen to even a good man when he sees the dark side of the moon.

The music is transcendent. Speaking of the dark side of the moon, Mann was unable to nail down the rights to “Comfortably Numb,” from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” but he found a way to use it anyway, incorporating the song’s gorgeous final chord sequence into “Manhunter’s” synth score. That score hooks us from the opening moments, when the image of the killer’s flashlight illuminating shag-carpeted suburban stairs is accompanied by frozen chilling notes of fear. But it’s the singular use of several postpunk songs that elevates “Manhunter” to a level worthy of Scorsese. After Dollarhyde has made dinner for Reba (Joan Allen), the blind woman he works in a photo lab with, the slow groove of Shriekback’s “This Big Hush” captures the sadness and desire of the human being who’s hidden inside him. And when he shows up at Reba’s house for their second date, and in his paranoid mind thinks she’s with the man who has given her a ride home (the moment where their two faces are lit up by his imagination is pure genius), the mounting energy of the Prime Movers’ “Strong as I Am” makes the scene enthrallingly ominous. And that’s not to mention Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” a needle drop that marks the film going insane.

The movie has too many extraordinary moments to count. The one where Graham has fallen asleep on an airplane, and his file of crime-scene photos falls open, terrifying the girl in the next seat (and us as well — it’s the first time we’ve seen them). The image of Stephen Lang’s sleazy tabloid reporter, set on fire in a wheelchair, barreling down the ramp of a parking garage. The moment when Reba, at the photo lab, reaches up with her hand to see if Dollarhyde is smiling, and he stops her and says (stone-faced), “Take my word for it. I’m smiling.” And more than any of those…

The moment when Graham solves the crime. It is, in a sense, just one clue. But it comes on top of all the others he has layered into his mind, and that the movie has layered into ours. Starting with the moment that he stands in the Leeds’ blood-soaked bedroom and figures out that the killer, for a moment, took off his surgical gloves. The fingerprint this yields leads nowhere, but Graham is really tapping into the killer’s relationship with his victims: that he wants to be loved and desired by them. Graham figures out the tools that the killer has brought with him (like a bolt cutter), and the way the killer uses fractured mirrors to see himself reflected in his victims’ eyes. And then, all these perceptions about coveting, scheming, and seeing are brought together into one deduction that fuses like a mystic reality. At that point, “Manhunter” becomes the fulfillment of what it always was: no mere crime story but a fable of empathy.

“The Final Cut” is actually the weaker cut. With rare exceptions, I’m not a fan of director’s cuts. There are two reasons for that. First, they’re hardly ever better; they’re almost always worse. (In the case of something like “Apocalypse Now Redux,” they can ruin a movie). But apart from the fact that directors restoring their pet lost scenes seldom adds much and usually subtracts, there’s a larger issue at stake. A great movie is a work of art that has an identity in the universe, like a novel or a painting. If you love it, you don’t want to see that identity changed.

The “Final Cut” of “Manhunter” that will be released on July 24 is the same as the Restored Director’s Cut of the film that came out on DVD in 2003. It adds a couple of minutes to the scene with Graham at the Atlanta police station (he now overexplains things; it was better when he just said, of the killer’s motive, “It’s in his dreams”), and there are a handful of added lines in the first scene with Lecter. The film also loses a few things (like the splattered condiments in the shootout with Dollarhyde — I missed that ketchup bottle!). But the biggest change is the addition, at the end, of a scene in which Graham, with his badly bruised face, goes to visit the next family. It’s an incredibly bad scene! I revere Michael Mann, but he made a mistake here. Beyond that, you don’t tamper with a movie like “Manhunter.” It is what it is, and what it is is sacred.

It really is a greater film than “The Silence of the Lambs.” Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning thriller was my favorite movie of 1991, and there’s no doubt that it’s a classic. It deserves every kudo it has ever gotten. Who’s the greater Lecter, Brian Cox or Anthony Hopkins? The answer is: Whichever one you happen to be watching. But “Manhunter” has a far more terrifying and profound villain (the taunting Buffalo Bill was always the weak link of Demme’s film). And as much as we all love “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Manhunter” stands as the richer, deeper, more disturbing and cathartic experience. It’s the thriller of our time. It’s the one that sees the light that makes the darkness visible.