Cape Fear

Starring: Robert De Niro

Directed by: Martin Scorsese

RS: Not Rated

1991 Thriller

Martin Scorsese Is America's most consistently vital director, so Cape Fear, his first crack at a thriller, raises expectations. But this boldly imagined film is also Scorsese's first remake, which raises the question "Why Cape Fear?" Director J. Lee Thompson's 1962 film worked just fine, as did Robert Mitchum as Max Cady, the ex-con who takes revenge on a lawyer (Gregory Peck) by scaring his wife (Polly Bergen) and daughter (Lori Martin). Shot in black and white on a modest budget, the original Cape. Fear had a slithery, disreputable, B-movie allure that still works in its favor.

In contrast, Scorsese shoots the works with a $34 million, wide-screen version that hits hardest where the first film hung back. Starting with Robert De Niro's portrait of pure, insinuating evil as Cady, Cape Fear sets out to fry your nerves to a frazzle, and it succeeds. But Scorsese doesn't live by jolts alone. He wants to plumb characters, examine issues of sin, guilt and redemption -- you know, make a Scorsese movie. In the first Cape Fear, Cady was the only walking time bomb; in the Scorsese version, everyone is ticking.

The film begins with Cady's release from prison. For over a decade he's been plotting revenge against his lawyer, Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte), for burying a report that proved the promiscuity of the girl he was accused of raping. Cady studied lawbooks and the Bible on those nights in prison when he wasn't being sodomized by inmates. He believes that Bowden -- living the good life in a rambling North Carolina home with his wife, Leigh (Jessica Lange), and nubile fifteen-year-old daughter, Danny (Juliette Lewis) -- is too much of a fat cat to get into heaven. It's up to Cady to save him by teaching him a few lessons about loss.

The religious theme was added by Scorsese and writer Wesley Strick (True Believer) to pump up Cady's role as an angel of death. But it's the development of the Bowden family that enriches the film. Peck, with his model family, was integrity chiseled in granite; his Bowden wasn't Cady's lawyer but a bystander who stopped Cady from assaulting a girl in a parking lot. Nolte, on the other hand, plays a flawed character who violated legal ethics by not helping Cady beat the rap. Bowden is also a bust as a husband; his wife (a graphic artist) has moved with him from the city to the suburbs in a last-ditch effort to save their marriage after his infidelity had almost wrecked it.

Nolte acts with blistering energy, and Lange is in top feral form, barely containing her resentment for her cheating husband and their alienated, pothead daughter. Maybe Cady thinks he's invading the American dream, but the Bowdens are more like the American nightmare -- the dysfunctional family. As in the director's best films (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Good-Fellas), the moral ambiguities are laced with dark wit. Cape Fear is often diabolically funny. In the 1962 version, Cady first showed his sinister hand by spying on the Bowdens at a bowling alley. Scorsese sets the scene in a place closer to his heart: a movie theater. Cady sits in front of the family, laughs so hard that they can't hear the film and then lights up a huge cigar that covers them in smoke. To Scorsese, this desecration of the temple of cinema is Cady's first sacrilege.

Soon, the war of nerves escalates: Cady confronts Bowden in his car, shows up outside his home and stares lewdly at his wife and daughter. The police (Mitchum turns in a terrific cameo as, yikes, a cop) can do nothing, since harassment is maddening but not illegal. Though Cady's ultimate plan is to rape the wife and daughter, he enjoys putting on different faces in public -- a buffoon in a Hawaiian shirt, a shy weakling in a seersucker suit. But the Bowdens see him for what he is: their psychological tensions made flesh. Scorsese shares with Hitchcock an obsession with Catholic guilt. Characters are either strengthened or destroyed by facing their demons.

When an office associate with whom Bowden has been flirting is brutally assaulted by Cady (she's too terrified to turn him in), Bowden hires a detective (the able Joe Don Baker) to guard his family. In the film's most disturbing scene, Cady -- posing as a teacher -- confronts Danny in the basement of her school. He charms her into sharing a joint. Realizing who he is, she bolts, but Cady blocks her path. He strokes her hair and softly kisses her, and Danny responds with a mixture of excitement and dread. It's a seductively chilling moment, hypnotically played by De Niro and Lewis, who emerges as a remarkable find. The incident spurs Bowden, who is uncomfortable about his daughter's burgeoning sexuality, to hire thugs to beat up Cady. The plan backfires. Cady's old-boy lawyer (Peck, in a fun cameo as a smarmbucket) brings his client to court on crutches, and Bowden is soon facing possible disbarment.

The film's violent and poundingly suspenseful climax moves from a stakeout at the Bowden home to a houseboat on the Cape Fear River. Aided by cinematographer Freddie Francis (Glory) and editor Thelma Schoonmaker (Raging Bull), Scorsese unleashes a series of shocks that will leave you breathless. To some, this will be overkill, and the late Bernard Herrmann's 1962 score (reorchestrated by Elmer Bernstein) may stir nostalgic thoughts of a less in-your-face movie era. Though Scorsese doesn't always transcend the pulp in Cape Fear, watching him try allows us to share the exhilaration he experiences behind the camera.

PETER TRAVERS
618 11-28-91