The first Hannibal run

By JEREMY REES

Audiences first saw Hannibal Lecter, lying in a blank prison cell, one hand idly picking at a brick.

Long before there was Anthony Hopkins hamming it up, there was Brian Cox dripping malevolence and haunting the memories of the few who saw him in Manhunter (1986).

Cox's Lecter was terrifying; a man so bored with the world the only way he could alleviate it would be to rip out your throat and drink your blood.

There was none of Hopkins' posturing about Chianti and flava beans, just the menace of a terrible violence that he could inflict at any time.

To see him was to become a scoffer at other Lecters. That's not Hannibal. This IS him.

The first portent came early with local cops querying Will Graham (William Petersen) the FBI agent who captured Lecter and paid for it with enough bites to put him in hospital with his sanity shredded.

"The psychologists call him a psychopath," he tells them. "They don't know what else to call him."

Graham faces his nemesis in a scene the exact opposite of the confrontation by Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling in the later, much more popular Silence of the Lambs.

Starling finds Hopkins' Lecter, in his dark underground cell, unnaturally still, exaggeratedly odd, almost a parody of psychos.

Graham finds a Lecter, deathly pale under the white lights of his tiny cell, who is watchful, affable and far more worryingly human.

"How did you catch me, Will?" asks Lecter.

Graham: "I had advantages."

Lecter: "What advantages?"

Graham: "You are insane, Dr Lecter."

It all ends badly, as Graham, who had come to pick up the scent of another serial killer, sprints out of the cell.

"Smell yourself," snarls Lecter.

It was easy to overlook at the time. The backers of Manhunter went bust, so it was released to just a few cinemas. Director Michael Mann, now considered a stylish director after The Last of the Mohicans, Heat and The Insider, was then just a guy who made Miami Vice programmes. There was no big-name cast.

But there was Mann's style, all pastels with sudden splashes of technicolour violence, portentous 1980s synthesiser music and a feel of endless foreboding.

And there was Cox. The Scottish Shakespearean actor was so intense you swore you could feel his malignancy long after the camera had moved on.

Cox's Lecter was so nasty you never wanted to see him again; you wanted him to rot in hell.

The other guy just keeps coming back.