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March 1995, Week 2

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From:
edwin jahiel <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Fri, 10 Mar 1995 12:29:45 CST
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----------------------------Original message----------------------------
CAPE FEAR is being discussed quite a bit on the net, so here's my
contribution to various groups, including some that might get involved.
Please note that the *** 3/4 rating may possibly be out of ***** rather
than the usual ****. There was a short period of experimentation with the
much more nuanced 5 star system at my newspaper. But it was soon abandoned
for a return to the 4 stars that are so widely in use. I cannot remember
whether CAPE FEAR was reviewed in that interim period. EJ
=======================================================================
by Edwin Jahiel
 
CAPE FEAR. *** 3/4 .  Directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by Wesley
Strick. Based on a screenplay by James R. Webb and "The Executioners", a
novel by John D. MacDonald.   Cast: Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Jessica
Lange, Joe Don Baker, Robert Mitchum, Juliette Lewis, Gregory Peck, Martin
Balsam, Fred Dalton Thompson, Illeana Douglas. A Universal release. 123
min. Rated R (extreme violence, language).
 
CAPE FEAR is most unpleasant , savagely suspenseful and scary. It is often
implausible. But it is extremely well made and fascinating.
 
Martin Scorsese has remade a 1962 thriller directed by J. Lee Thompson,
that prolific, Bristol-born maker of British and American action movies,
many of them forgettable, many of them with Charles Bronson.
 
Thompson's high-water marks are still THE GUNS OF NAVARONE (1961) and CAPE
FEAR (1962), both starring Gregory Peck. In the original CAPE FEAR, Peck
plays  Sam Bowden a Southern lawyer whose testimony had sent rapist Max
Cady (Robert Mitchum) to jail for six years. Released, the convict begins
to haunt and harass, physically and psychologically --but legally --Sam,
his wife and their daughter.
 
Scorsese's version is close to the original but makes the situation even
more intolerable as well as more complex. For one thing, the villainy is
shared. Attorney Peck was a straight-arrow southern gentleman, close to his
Oscar-winning Atticus Finch role in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, also of 1962
The new Sam Bowden is Nick Nolte, interestingly cast half in character (he
is none too wholesome) and half against type (he is running scared).
Nolte, as Max's lawyer some 14 years ago, had suppressed evidence which
would have freed Max, even though the latter was guilty.  (This twist is
the movie's Achilles' heel, as it is unconvincingly and insufficiently
explained).
 
In the new version Sam is subtly close to an affluent redneck "good
citizen" counterpart of Sam. His happy little family has become a
dislocated, joyless trio of a husband with a roving eye, a resentful wife
(Jessica Lange) and an adolescent daughter at odds with her parents.
 
Last but not least is, of course, the casting of Robert De Niro , in his
seventh film with Scorsese, as Max. De Niro does not have the gross
sensuality of  Mitchum, but he is a veritable Mad Max, a tattoed psycho as
obsessed with revenge as the John Lithgow character in the current
RICOCHET, a Georgia revivalist cracker, a fiend as mentally sick  as -- not
so curiously -- Mitchum was when he played the itinerant killer-preacher in
the legendary THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER.
 
As opposed to Mitchum-Max's shorter term, De Niro-Max had 14 years in jail
in which to seethe, to learn how to read and to teach himself the Bible as
well as criminal law.  Max, the devil incarnate,  combines both into a
horrendous instrument of revenge and, in his own , twisted mind,
retribution also means the redemption of his prey.
 
CAPE FEAR does not always hold water, not in the near-impossible ways Max
turns up, not even  in the stormy, final, aquatic sequences where Max
speaks in tongues. But much of our disbelief is distracted by the movie's
performances and technical proficiency,  the maelstrom of its rhythm, and
the film-conscious way that brings in so much past cinema , and so well.
 
In the original movie, Max had assaulted a bar girl who, terrified of him,
refused to press charges and left town . This character in the remake is a
courthouse clerk with a crush on Nolte. Her meeting with Max is unexpected
and unlikely, but you may discount this weakness because Illeana Douglas
(about whom I could find nothing) does such a convincing job of her
drunken-horny part.
 
Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum have small roles in the remake, partly as
in-references that give the film a certain element of humor. Yet, on the
whole, humor, black or otherwise, is not too apparent in this movie. Max is
too terrifying to make you smile when he talks literature and speaks of  "a
roman a clef", especially as those words are addressed to Danielle, the
15-year old Bowden daughter (Juliette Lewis). He "seduces" (note the
quotation marks) her in two successive sequences ( on the phone and in
person) that must rate with the most chilling, most distasteful ever, as
well as the best scripted, filmed and performed. (Juliette Lewis reminds me
somewhat of Rita Tushingham in A TASTE OF HONEY, but she's also like
nothing I have seen before.)
 
If everyone involved in this movie were to get his/her due, the list of
compliments would be as long as the list of credits, both for the actors
and the film-making team. The latter includes cinematographer Freddie
Francis (Oscar for GLORY) who also specializes in directing horror movies,
and who makes excellent use of this experience here;  production designer
Henry Bumstead (Oscars for TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and THE STING); the great
editor Thelma Schoonmaker, a Scorsese regular; the composer Elmer Bernstein
who adapted Bernard Herrmann's haunting, persistent score from  the earlier
CAPE FEAR.
 
CAPE FEAR is Scorsese's first film in wide anamorphic screen (Panavision).
The techniques are masterful. The screen is full (and sharp) from edge to
edge, with images that keep charging at you as fast as the boxing sequences
in RAGING BULL. The camera  is one of the most nervous on record, pausing
for ominously quiet stretches then resuming its agitation in expressionist
style. There are scenes when there is almost one image per beat.
 
This process contains elements of earlier Scorseses,  but with no feeling
of deja vu. There are many more, obsessive closeups than Scorsese normally
uses,  and components that seem entirely new, like shots that dolly onto
the characters as though they were going through them.
 
Other shots (like dollying in empty spaces) play  with the subliminal
memory of filmgoers, of Kubrick's THE SHINING, Truffaut's FAHRENHEIT 451,
or  Alfred Hitchcock's suspense devices, reinforced both by the music of
Herrmann (Hitchcock's main composer)  and by the casting.
 
There are, for example,  PSYCHO-connected techniques here, and
additionally, Martin Balsam , who was both in the original CAPE FEAR and in
PSYCHO, turns up as in a cameo as a judge.  To add more frosting of
corruption to his cine-cake, Scorsese casts Joe Don Baker as a defrocked
cop, now a private eye with no morals, a clear reference to the bad Baker
who was the pitiless killer in CHARLEY VARRICK rather to the good Baker,
Sheriff Buford Pusser.
 
One can read in CAPE FEAR some of Scorsese's usual concerns, like
loneliness, guilt, and above all, the ultimate failure that so many of his
characters face, much like those of another master, John Huston.  But
metaphysical values in this movie are a secondary concern. First and
foremost, CAPE FEAR is a superbly done shocker. The question is: is it
wickedly brilliant or brilliantly wicked?
 
[Published 22 Nov. 91]

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