Cape Fear (1991)

The way he sees the character of Sam Bowden is the key to why Martin Scorsese wanted to remake the 1962 thriller Cape Fear. Bowden, played by Nick Nolte, is a defense attorney who is threatened by a man from his past—a rapist who has finished a fourteen-year prison sentence and wants revenge for what he believes (correctly) was a lousy defense. In the original film, Sam Bowden was a good man trying to defend his family from a madman. In the Scorsese version, Bowden is flawed and guilty, and indeed everyone in this film is weak in one way or another, and there are no heroes.

The movie, filmed near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, shows Nolte at the head of a troubled family. He and his wife (Jessica Lange) have been through counseling because of his infidelities, and now he seems to be in the opening stages of a new affair. They live in a rambling house on a lot of land, but there isn't space enough for their daughter (Juliette Lewis), who hates it when they fight, and locks herself in her bedroom to brood and watch MTV (and parodies of both a John Waters film. This is a family with a lot of problems even before Max Cady arrives on the scene.

Cady is played by Robert De Niro, in a role filled by Robert Mitchum in 1962. Covered with tattoos spelling out dire biblical warnings, Cady is an iron-pumping redneck who learned to read in prison ("I started with Dick, Jane, and Spot, and went on to law books"). He drives into town in a Mustang convertible and offers to teach Bowden something about the law. And soon everywhere Bowden looks, he sees the ominous, threatening presence of Max Cady: outside a restaurant, in a movie theater (where a parody of The Shining is playing), on the wall bordering his property. But Cady is clever and stays just this side of the law; he doesn't actually trespass, and he doesn't do physical harm to Bowden.

It's almost a game with Cady to taunt Bowden to the breaking point. Bowden goes to the cops, to a lawyer, to a private investigator, and as he seeks help we begin to realize that no one in this universe is untainted. Among the corrupt are Robert Mitchum, as a cop who hints that the lawyer should take the law into his own hands, and Gregory Peck, as a lawyer who represents Cady, and Martin Balsam (also from the original film) as a judge. What we are looking at here is a film noir version of the classic Scorsese hero, who in film after film is a man tortured by guilt and the weakness of the flesh, and seeking forgiveness and redemption. And in this new version of Max Cady, Scorsese gives us not simply a bad man, but an evil one—a man whose whole purpose is to show Sam Bowden that he is a criminal, too.

A strata of evil underlies the whole film and is dramatized in the character of Danielle, the Bowdens' daughter, who is going on sixteen and is attracted to the menace and implied sexuality of Max Cady. It's as if she likes anybody who can bug her parents. In a tense, disturbing scene, Cady poses as a drama teacher and Danielle goes along even after she knows who he really is—allowing herself to be verbally seduced because evil and danger are attractive to her.

Nolte's character is more complex. He is not a bad man, but not a very good one, and he finally agrees with his private eye (Joe Don Baker) that maybe three guys should be hired to pound some sense into Max Cady. When Cady thrashes the three goons and comes looking for the Nolte character, we realize the complexity of this movie. Unlike the simplistic version of this scene we have seen in a hundred thrillers, what Scorsese gives us is a villain who has been wronged, seeking to harm a hero who has sinned.

The final struggle between Bowden and Cady passes beyond the plausible into the apocalyptic, and Cady delivers one-liners and bitter aphorisms long after he should be crazed by pain. But the final struggle between the two men is visually sensational, and once again Scorsese avoids the simplistic moralism of a conventional thriller; the key to the passage is the close-up of Bowden trying to wash the blood from his hands.

Cape Fear establishes Scorsese as a master of a traditional Hollywood genre, able to mold it to his own themes and obsessions. This is the first film in a production deal Scorsese has with Universal and Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, and represents his access to budgets much larger than he has worked with in the past. The result seems to be a certain impersonality in a film by this most personal of directors—the Scorsese touch on a genre piece, rather than a film torn out of the director's soul. In place of the personal immediacy of earlier films, Scorsese offers a meditation on the presence of evil in everyday life, on the relationship between religious zealotry and sadistic violence, and on a dark side of southern culture. Finally, Scorsese, as in The King of Comedy, explores the blurred distinctions between reality and the mythic narratives of the cinema.

Cast:

Performer, Character

Robert De Niro, Max Cady

Nick Nolte, Sam Bowden

Jessica Lange, Leigh Bowden

Juliette Lewis, Danielle Bowden

Joe Don Baker, Claude Kersek

Robert Mitchum, Lieutenant Elgart

Gregory Peck, Lee Heller

Martin Balsam, Judge

Illeana, Douglas Lori Davis

Fred Dalton Thompson (Now Senator), Tom Broadbent

Domenica, Scorsese Dani's Girlfriend

Catherine Scorsese (Marty's Mom),Fruit Stand Customer

Charles Scorsese, Fruit Stand Customer

Production Credits:

Producer, Barbara De Fina and Kathleen Kennedy

Director, Martin Scorsese

Screenwriter, Wesley Strick based on the 1962 screenplay by James R. Webb (from the novel The Executioners by John D. MacDonald)

Editor, Thelma Schoonmaker

Cinematographer, Freddie Francis Music

Composer, Bernard Herrmann