Cape Fear
Starring Robert de Niro, Jessica Lange
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Reviewed by Steve Painter
Put together a 1950s plot with some modern ultraviolence, and you don't need to know much more about Cape Fear. A number of reviewers have described this as a very scary movie. Perhaps they saw it in empty preview theatres, because people around me were laughing derisively by the end — those who resisted the impulse to walk out after the first rape scene. (Or perhaps they just didn't have the nerve to say Scorsese has made a dud.)
Cape Fear is a remake of a 1962 Gregory Peck-Robert Mitchum film about a nice, typical nuclear family, each member doing their best to make the others miserable, when along comes a really nasty baddie to show them how well off they really are (he says he's going to teach them about Loss).
Basher-rapist Max Cady has used his 14 years in the slammer to become a bit of a philosopher, and now he's out for revenge against lawyer Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) for failing to defend him properly all those years before.
Poor Sam, it's the only blot on his career, and no-one knows about it except him and the Omnipotent Being of His Choice, but a Sin is a Sin and he's in for it. You see, even though he was defending Cady, Sam was so shocked by his client's crime that he failed to introduce a report indicating that the 16 year-old rape victim really deserved it, having slept with at least three other men before she ran into Maxie.
All this provides plenty of opportunities to smear liberal amounts of red gel around the sets, and particularly over Max, who couldn't care less. None of the gel comes from the normal, white, people but the Bowdens' disposable Latino housemaid inevitably makes her contribution (fortunately in the kitchen, not on the carpet).
Besides being subtle enough to get well on the way to seducing Dannie, the none-too-bright 15 year-old daughter, Max is your state-of-the-art indestructible villain with near-supernatural powers, able to fight off a team of professional thugs hired to hospitalise him, get in and out of the Bowdens' home at will and follow them wherever they may go.
Where they do go is a houseboat at Cape Fear, where Max proceeds to run amok as the cosy little home is tossed on stormy seas (get it?). Eventually, Max goes unrepentant to his fate beneath the waves, and Dannie gets to do a little homespun Philosophising to wrap the whole thing up.
Toss in a little gratuitous misogyny in the rape and pre-rape scenes, and what you have is a simple 1950s North American folktale of an ungrateful people complacently unaware of the fiendishly clever, ruthless forces of Evil just itching to get at their throats.