Regardless of these over-the-top components from the supply materials, Mann emphasizes the gumshoe, workaday nature of the FBI, which restricts even Dolarhyde from being too outrageous. It’s a tough project, but in some way Noonan pulled it off. A hulking man who stood 6’5″, Noonan reduce an intimidating presence, which additionally led to him being forged as Frankenstein’s Monster in The Monster Squad. Nonetheless, he balanced his intimidating physique with a gentleness, accentuated by his mushy tone of voice and heat eyes.
In his greatest roles, Noonan performed these two components off each other to create a posh determine. He emphasised the gentleness of Frankenstein’s monster and made the Satanist Mr. Ulmer in The Home of the Satan somebody the principle character would believably belief. He used his measurement to make actor Sammy Barnathan in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York all of the extra pathetic when he will get weak.
However his greatest second got here as Francis Dolarhyde in Manhunter. Noonan will get us to really feel sorry for Dolarhyde as Graham and Lecktor uncover the trauma that made him right into a killer, and we’re even moved by his romance with a blind coworker performed by Joan Allen. None of these emotions go away when Dolarhyde first reveals his diabolical nature. Relatively, Noonan makes use of them to intensify the horror.
Halfway via Manhunter, a botched operation ends in Dolarhyde capturing the tabloid reporter Freddie Lounds (Stephen Lang). With Lounds sure to a chair, Dolarhyde reveals himself in his individual because the Purple Dragon, Devil as imagined within the poetry and etchings of William Blake. He monologues to the captive Lounds about his energy, about how Lounds owes him not worry however “awe.” At first of the monologue, Dolarhyde exhibits Lounds photographs of Blake’s drawings and images of victims, punctuating every picture with the query, “Do you see?”
Within the Harris novel Purple Dragon, and the later substandard adaptation by Melania director Brett Ratner, Dolarhyde makes use of this second to disclose his muscular physique, prosthetic sharp tooth, and enormous dragon tattoo. However Mann chooses a extra typical strategy, dressing Dolarhyde in common road garments. On this model, he wears a nylon stocking excessive half of his head and doesn’t put within the tooth till the ultimate moments.
Nonetheless, the scene nonetheless chills due to the delicate means Noonan performs Dolarhyde as each imperious and nervous. He stays calm all through his speech, solely barely elevating his voice when Lounds’s eyes shut. Whereas the calm could possibly be interpreted as confidence, particularly as Noonan towers over the seated Lang, it as an alternative reads as reverence. Dolarhyde really believes that he has transcended the physique that he hates, that he’s develop into a vessel of the Purple Dragon. Noonan by no means overplays it, by no means will get into the campiness that typically overtakes Hopkins’s work as Lecter. He performs it light, human, and totally horrifying.
