CAPE FEAR
With Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis, Joe Don Baker, Illeana Douglas, Fred Dalton Thompson, and Robert Mitchum.
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A few weeks ago I watched the original Cape Fear on video. (Or I tried to watch it; Universal Pictures had encoded the video with something called Copyguard, meant to prevent people from dubbing it, but it had the unfortunate effect of changing the lighting in every shot from dark to light and sometimes back again.) The movie is pretty awful in most respects–its script formulaic (James R. Webb, adapting John D. MacDonald’s novel The Executioners), its direction plodding (the lumbering J. Lee Thompson), its lead performances wooden (Gregory Peck, Polly Bergen, Lori Martin). But it’s exceptional in two respects: Robert Mitchum turns in a truly creepy performance as a psycho just out of prison (even Dwight Macdonald conceded how good he was), second only to his even creepier part as the homicidal preacher in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. And Bernard Herrmann created a taut and evocative score. Otherwise, pace Barry Gifford, this movie is entirely forgettable. As we all know, nastiness is a deeply revered quality in the American cinema of the 90s–consider all the raves conferred on Silence of the Lambs–but not even Mitchum at his near-best and Herrmann at his second-best could make me like this 60s version.
So why did Martin Scorsese, the most respected American film director alive, want to remake this dubious piece of schlock? For months we’ve been reading about how he wanted to do a genre piece, how he accepted it as a challenge, how he needed another hit (an excuse already used for The Color of Money), how Robert De Niro suggested the project. Or could it be that Scorsese was aiming to please some of his most enthusiastic admirers, the ones who reserve their highest praise for his nastiest movies–Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull? Such critics praise him not only for his nastiness but for his flashy technique, his arsenal of film-buff references, his religious obsessions, and his romantically doomed antisocial heroes–and I think Scorsese has given this critical cheering section exactly what it wants: an anthology of Scorsesean themes and stylistic quirks, perfect fodder for a term paper. All that’s missing, really, is a setting and reason for all these supposed virtues.
In both versions the villain was convicted many years ago of rape and assault; in the original the lawyer was an eyewitness, while in the Scorsese version he was the criminal’s attorney and deliberately suppressed a piece of evidence–the victim’s promiscuity–that probably would have gotten the criminal a shorter sentence. In both versions the villain is interested in taking revenge on the lawyer in as many ways as he can devise–poisoning the family dog and raping and brutalizing a woman friend and colleague for starters, then moving on to the wife and daughter–and the lawyer is increasingly prevented from defending himself and his household by various legalities, a situation exacerbated by the legal expertise the villain has picked up in prison.
One can see that Scorsese has worked hard to make his characters more interesting than they were in the original, and if working were having, he might have produced an interesting picture. (He’s probably been hampered by his lack of familiarity with the south. With the exception of Mitchum–who turns up briefly here as a police lieutenant, exuding reality and conviction from every pore–the local color is all hand-me-down stuff, dimly remembered from other bad movies.) Because of Scorsese’s attention to character, the internal tensions in the family promise a great deal, but nothing gets delivered; the telegraphic leaps of the narrative never give these people a chance to grow or reveal themselves beyond the plot points they’re designed to articulate. One can admire in theory Scorsese’s decision to make all the adult characters unsympathetic, but in practice this means that one can’t care much what happens to any of them. Nor can I go along with the defense of a friend and fellow critic who argues that this is a movie about archetypes rather than a movie about characters; maybe it is, but so are most of the worst movies ever made.
