Demme - a great filmmaker trapped inside comedies

I’m a Demme uber-fan, but I find his earlier comedic stuff pretty ropey.

The films have an undeniable eccentric charm but the humour just doesn’t click with me for the most part, far more misses than hits. I felt the same with Something Wild. His goofy loser leading men are kind of annoying… but both films kick into gear when they morph into thrillers toward the end.

No surpise, then, that when he turned his hand to thrillers for his next film… he made a cracker, but I didn’t expect it to be one of the greatest thrillers ever, showered with all 5 major Oscars… The Silence Of The Lambs.

Next was Oscar winning courtroom drama Philadelphia.

Then 10 years later he re-teamed with Denzel for superb underrated thriller The Manchurian Candidate.

It begs the question… why was this guy making goofy comedies when he clearly had a talent for making Oscar winning, block-busting serious films? And why did a studio entrust said goofy-comedy filmmaker with a prestige project like SOTL..?

Married To The Mob briefly features Demme’s signature move of having actors look into the lens, but it’s hand held, scrappy and low budget. Snap to SOTL (which is also shot by Demme’s regular DP Tak Fujimoto) two years later and he uses it throughout almost the whole film, yet the camera is steady, carefully composed.. like an amateur suddenly became a professional.

It’s just odd to me that an artist so clearly gifted in the making of serious cinema spent so much time making mediocre comedies and music documentaries. This guy was a Hitchcock-level genius!