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Now Playing - The Movie Review Podcast

Book Review: The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

Now Playing - The Movie Review Podcast

Venganza Media, Inc.

Tv & Film, Film History, Tv & Film:film Reviews, Film Reviews, Film Interviews

4.5 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2011

⏱️ 26 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Time for the main course of the Lecter books! Books & Nachos is now part of Now Playing Podcast. Before our book reviews were branded as Now Playing Podcast Book Reviews, they were released under a separate show called Books & Nachos. That podcast focused on book discussions, most of which tied directly into films we were covering on Now Playing. We’ve now merged those episodes into the main Now Playing Podcast feed for easier access and a complete archive. But these older episodes still have the original Books & Nachos intro and credits on those older recordings.    Before he was winning Oscars and dominating the silver screen, Hannibal Lecter returned to the page in Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs. In this second Lecter story, the brilliant but imprisoned doctor is enlisted to help an FBI trainee track down a killer who skins his victims—while Lecter quietly plots a gruesome escape of his own. Join Stuart as he revisits the novel that deepened Lecter’s legend, examining how Clarice Starling’s presence reshapes the dynamic with the infamous doctor and helped turn Harris’s cultured cannibal into one of fiction’s most compelling villains.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is Books and Nachos, a podcast for those of us who find excitement in the pages of a good book.

0:12.5

Fiction and nonfiction, graphic novels, and more.

0:15.5

We are here to help you find something great to read.

0:24.9

Thank you. something great to read. Hello, and welcome to Books and Nachos, the Vincan's immediate podcast about all things in print.

0:29.8

I am your host, Stuart, in L.A., and we are back still talking about Hannibal Lecter all

0:34.4

months long.

0:35.1

We're on to what I would call our main course, The Silence of the Lambs, the second novel in the four-part Hannibal Lecter series. It was published

0:43.2

in 1988, which makes it coming seven years after Red Dragon and two years after the failure

0:50.0

of the movie adaptation of Red Dragon called Manhunter. And while you might think that they

0:54.0

wouldn't be excited to make a movie of Silence of the Lambs given the box office failure of the last

0:59.3

movie, it's easy to see why anyone that would spend the time reading the novel could see how

1:04.4

much better it is. I really feel like they've perfected the formula here that Thomas Harris

1:09.1

has taken the strength of what he started with

1:11.8

and really tightened it and that we basically have the same formula. It's essentially the same

1:17.2

story as the last time. We have a criminal profiler. We have Lector as a caged advisor and we have

1:24.9

a on the loose serial killer. But everyone plays a more participatory role here and

1:30.2

I feel like it's got a lot more tension and a lot more pizzazz it's you'd want to see this movie

1:35.6

even knowing that Manhunter hadn't done well and I feel like their best asset is our profiler that

1:42.2

yes well Graham is gone he's retired and he's staying in florida and now we have

1:46.6

clarese starling stepping into his role here and clarice is fascinating to us for two reasons one of course

1:53.2

she's a woman in a profession that is dominated by men and we question how she's going to

1:58.9

handle the fact that she and basically her roommate o'Delia are the only women in a male-dominated profession trying to get dignity and trying to prove themselves.

...

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