The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Mr. Serious Narrator does his best to reduce this trailer to cheese, but it’s still a powerful inducement sixteen years later.

I apologize for the pixellated YouTube version here. There’s another one on YouTube, but the audio sync is way off.

This trailer gets us jittery right from the start, with near-subliminal flashes of Dr. Hannibal Lecter of Baltimore. That style is continued throughout, with flashes of Buffalo Bill during Agent Crawford’s run-down of Bill’s M.O. The flashes at 00:34 are, respectively, a shot of the headless mannequin in Benjamin Raspail’s car and Clarice looking at a photo of victim Frederica Bimmel.

I enjoy spotting stuff in the trailer that didn’t make it into the movie; in this case it’s the exchange at 1:08 — “You told me you didn’t spook easily.” “You call this easy, sir?”

Oddly, the trailer seems to imply that Lecter escapes and goes after Clarice — something she scarcely worries about in the actual movie (“He would consider it rude”). It’s probably done that way by design, to keep you uncomfortable, since theoretically you don’t know the plot yet (if you hadn’t read Thomas Harris’ bestseller).

Overall, a tense 104-second compression of an intense movie; belying Jonathan Demme’s school days under Roger Corman’s tutelage, the trailer sells the film as action-packed and thrill-loaded, though by now we know it does its work more subtly than that. So the trailer sort of misrepresents the movie, but not enough to be outright lying.

BONUS CLIP: The meet-cute between Starling and Lecter. One of the greatest introductions to a movie character in history.

~ by Rob Gonsalves on September 14, 2007.