Normally I have a little paragraph setting up the article. Well I’ve been feeling a little out of it today and I decided to skip it. The movie this time is Cape Fear, so let’s get to it.
Lawyer Sam Bowden has about everything a man could ask for: A beautiful wife, a lovely daughter, an expensive house and even a woman on the side to play squash and potentially have sex with. Then one day, a man named Max Cady rolls into town, a man that Bouden actually represented in court. Seems that Cady was recently released from prison after spending 14 years there for battery (also some rape and murder), and after a decade to think about it, Cady is convinced that Bouden is responsible. So he’s going to do everything in his power to make Bowden's life a living hell, and he’s smart enough to do it without getting caught. With his life and his career threatening to crumble down around his ears, Bouden must confront the fact that sometimes all the fancy laws and policemen in the world can’t do a damn thing to protect you. Sometimes you have to stand on your own to protect what’s yours, even if it goes against everything you thought you believed in. Every man must go through their own hell to reach salvation, and Cape Fear is Sam Bowden's hell.
Now I don’t research the films for this Marathon prior to viewing, so I actually didn’t know that this Cape Fear is actually a remake of the original Cape Fear made back in 1962, directed by J. Lee Thompson and starring Martin Balsam, Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum (who all make appearances in this film). However, once you do know that, you get the impression that Scorsese is making a conscious effort to not just retell the story of Cape Fear, but to replicate the feeling of old-school thrillers as a whole. Robert De Niro’s portrayal of Max Cady, which had to be inspired by Mitchum’s performance in Night of the Hunter, the abundance of orchestral musical stings, the way Scorsese frames certain scenes and lingers on certain shots (the bit where Bouden is brushing his teeth while his wife is in the background feels incredibly Hitchcockian), it all fits together with that Hitchcock/Laughton style in mind. Which is pretty cool, I mean Scorsese is one of the biggest director’s to come out the ‘New Hollywood’ wave of the 1970s, which redefined the role of the director and changed how stories were told through film. To see the man so intimately connected to filmmaking as we know it now deliberately reference an older style like that is certainly interesting.
I dunno though, as much as I can appreciate an attempt revisiting that style, I feel like there are points where it ends up undercutting the emotional impact of what’s happening on screen. The musical stings and the repeated shots which picture the roiling (and for some reason purple) clouds, which may have been effective in 1962 just end up feeling unbelievably cheesy in 1991. This is a movie about a rapist and murderer terrorizing a family, who actually does some raping and murdering in the film, so you’d expect a certain level of tension that carries throughout the film. Most of the time Scorsese works it out and Cape Fear manages to be a chilling and uncomfortable experience, even managing to capture the classic thriller atmosphere that he’s aiming for (mostly in the second half I’d say), but then those stings or something else pops in and it feels less like you’re watching a descendent of Vertigo and Rope and more like the Twilight Zone movie. Melodramatic at best and goofy at worst is the best way I can think of to describe it, which is the exact same problem I had with another film of his, 2010’s Shutter Island. If Scorsese had approached Cape Fear in the way he approached Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, gritty, dirty, rather than riding the nostalgia tip, I feel like it would have been a lot better off.
Like I said though, Scorsese manages to hit the mark about 80% of the time in Cape Fear, and he managed to collect a pretty impressive list of names to act in it. Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis, Joe Don Baker, Robert De Niro, high class talent that put on a pretty high class performance. So I can see why it’s earned a spot in pop culture, and that’s why it gets a recommendation from me. Just try not to wait 14 years before you see it, alright?
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