For this month’s next review for Genre Grandeur – Movies featuring beaches or waterfront scenes. – here’s a review of Cape Fear (1991) by Paul of the People’s Movies.

Thanks again to Darren of Movie Reviews 101 for choosing this month’s genre.

Next month’s genre has been chosen by Paul of the People’s Movies and we will be reviewing our favorite Films About Food.

Please get me your submissions by the 25th of Apr by sending them to food@movierob.net

Try to think out of the box!

Let’s see what Paul thought of this movie:

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Cape Fear (1991)

Scorsese’s adaptation of John D. MacDonald’s The Executioner’s walks in the footsteps of the Peck/Mitchum classic about a lawyer and his family terrorised by a recently-released and violent convict. Comparisons with J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 version aren’t churlish or beside the point if you invoke it’s spectre so prominently. It’s possible that it’s even the point to draw comparisons so readily and enjoyably. Both owe a debt to Hitchcock and positively prostrate themselves at his altar. Thompson through his connection with Bernard Hermann and Scorsese via the use of Saul Bass’ opening credits and visual ticks (the ghostly negative figure of Cady haunting Bowden’s room, a sickly green glow which penetrates through the slats of the Bowden bedroom window and bathes Jessica Lange in a neon pea soup) – and through Elmer Bernstein’s re-working of Hermann’s original score. It’s like watching Hitchcock twice-removed through a prism – an exercise that’s akin to enjoying a really good cover version of a classic rock song by an unexpected younger group.

De Niro’s convict Max Cady, doesn’t have the believable raw sexual power of Mitchum’s muscleman, but he is more volatile, much more of a loose cannon who could go off at any point without prior warning. It makes the viewing experience feel more unpredictable. With Mitchum, there’s a feeling of inevitability, of a storm brewing; De Niro’s villain feels more like a spark that potentially ignites destruction in a fireworks factory. That ragged energy comes with a price, though. For all the great moments of cigar chomping and braying in the cinema, there are also moments where he tends towards histrionics. The pantomime death scene, for instance, feels less like the death throes of a vanquished soldier and more like the melting of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Nick Nolte’s harassed lawyer is an altogether different beast to Peck’s. Peck’s works because he is Peck: eminently believable as the whiter-than-white “good man”. Nolte’s Bowden is his own creep. A man who lies, is on the cusp of an affair with a colleague and, by his own admission, partly responsible for the mess in which he finds himself. He’s a jerk, too, just less of a jerk than Cady and much less able to deal with the situation into which he’s thrown. Making Bowden, in this version, his own kind of prick makes his nightmare more believable and more interesting.

Juliette Lewis’s disoriented teenager, Danielle, is arguably Scorsese’s secret weapon here. As Bowden’s daughter, we, as an audience, fear she is most at risk, and yet she finds herself drawn to Cady’s danger with a frisson of sexual longing. It’s a performance which walks a line between vulnerable naivety and infuriating, misplaced confidence, and is pretty much perfect.

The sheer level of visually explicit violence is likely to turn some off. Thompson’s original excels at a kind of slow-burning implied brutality, particularly in the scenes where Mitchum’s Cady describes his prolonged abuse of his ex-wife. Scorsese opts for the Grand Guignol approach, splashing blood across the scene.

Not likely to be punted into the canon of the director’s best; this feels a bit like the work of a man blowing off steam after the presumed intensity of Goodfellas, it’s nevertheless a maniacally entertaining, if not always taut, thriller.