PITTSBURGH - Sen. Barack Obama held a campaign rally on Friday in the Soldiers and Sailors museum in Pittsburgh. No drama there? Well, the building was used to film a crucial sequence in the movie “The Silence of the Lambs.”
For anyone not familiar with the 1991 thriller, the scene occurs when serial killer Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins, is locked in a large cage from which he toys with Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee played by Jodie Foster .

It’s in this scene that she discloses to him her childhood memory of finding a slaughterhouse for lambs.

The cage is super secure but not secure enough to hold Lecter, who escapes by clubbing his guards to death, stringing one of them up from the walls and then ….

Actually, you should see the movie for yourself. It didn’t win five Oscars for nothing.

Pennsylvania Sen. Robert Casey held a news conference to explain his decision to endorse Obama in the very room where the cage was constructed, a spacious, opulent chamber with an ornate balcony.

Obama, who is running for the Democratic nomination, made no reference to the film in his speech in a hall downstairs.

But there was a distant echo of one of its most chilling lines. Lecter taunts Starling when she visits him in the cage with the words: “People will say we’re in love.”

During his speech, a supporter shouted to Obama: “I love you, Obama.” And he replied smoothly: “I love you back.”

Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Cohn. Obama (L) shakes hands with Senator Bob Casey at a campaign event at Soldiers and Sailors Military Museum and Memorial in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, March 28, 2008.