| Cape Fear | |
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 Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Martin Scorsese |
| Produced by | Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall (executives) Barbara De Fina |
| Written by | Wesley Strick |
| Starring | Nick Nolte Robert De Niro Jessica Lange Juliette Lewis Joe Don Baker |
| Cinematography | Freddie Francis |
| Editing by | Thelma Schoonmaker |
| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
| Release date(s) | November 13, 1991 |
| Running time | 128 min. |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Cape Fear is a 1991 thriller film, directed by Martin Scorsese. It is a remake of the 1962 film of the same name and tells the story of a family man, a former public defender, whose family is threatened by a convicted rapist who wants vengeance for having been imprisoned for 14 years because of the lawyer's purposefully faulty defense tactics, prejudicing the accused. It received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor (Robert De Niro) and Best Supporting Actress (Juliette Lewis). The two were also nominated for Golden Globe Awards.
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Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) is a former Atlanta public defender who is now in private practice in the quiet town of New Essex, North Carolina. Max Cady (Robert De Niro) is a client Sam defended 14 years prior to the setting of the movie. Cady, who was being tried for the rape and battery of a young woman, was illiterate at the time of the trial and was unable to read a report Sam kept hidden from him and the court that revealed the young woman Cady raped to have been promiscuous. The report might well have lightened Cady's sentence or even acquitted him had Sam brought it to light.
After his release from prison, Cady seeks out Sam, revealing to him that the once-illiterate ex-con learned to read in prison and even assumed his own defense, unsuccessfully appealing his conviction several times. Cady also hints strongly to Sam that he has learned about the buried report, noting that the judge and the prosecutor in his case were trying to do right by their jobs. Knowing that he has a major problem on his hand, Sam attempts to bribe Cady to make him go away, an offer Cady dismisses with laughter.
Several incidents involving Cady begin to impact the Bowden family, which consists of Sam's wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) and their teenage daughter Danielle (Juliette Lewis). The family dog is mysteriously poisoned and Sam sees Cady at night perched on the wall just outside his property limits. Sam attempts to have Cady arrested but has no real evidence to support charging Cady with a crime.
Before long, Cady ups the ante. He brutally rapes a female colleague of Sam's, who refuses to press charges against Cady out of fear. Cady also approaches Danielle at her school by pretending to be her new drama teacher and nearly seduces her. These incidents lead Sam to buy a gun and hire a private investigator named Kersek (Joe Don Baker) to follow Cady. Eventually, Kersak persuades Sam to hire three men to beat Cady in an effort to intimidate him but, as Sam watches the assualt in horror from a hiding place, Cady turns the tide on his attackers and beats them into submission.
Before the assault, Sam approached Cady in an restaurant and warned him to leave town or suffer the consequences. Cady surreptitiously taped the conversation, and uses the recording (and an exaggerated display of his own injuries) to file for a restraining order against Sam. Cady's lawyer, Lee Heller (Gregory Peck) also files a complaint against Sam with the North Carolina State Bar. Sam and Kersak reason that Cady may try to enter the Bowden house during Sam's appearance at a Bar hearing out of town. They fake Sam's departure for the hearing and hole up at the house, hoping that Cady will break in so that Sam can shoot and kill him with impunity. As they wait, however, Sam suddenly realizes that Cady must have already been inside the house when he poisoned the dog. At that moment, Cady attacks and kills Kersak in the Bowden kitchen and Sam, Leigh and Dani discover his body together with that of the Bowdens' housekeeper. Horrified, they flee in a car to their boat, which is docked upstate along Cape Fear.
Cady follows them by literally tying himself to the underbelly of the Bowdens' car. That night, Cady attacks the family on the boat, beating and tying up Sam, and preparing to rape both Leigh and Dani while Sam watches. Dani manages to temporarily avert the nightmare by spraying Cady with lighter fluid while he lights a cigar, causing the psychopath to jump off the boat into the water in order to put out the flames that are consuming him. Cady clings to a rope tied to the boat, however, and pulls himself back onboard. As the boat is being torn apart in a violent storm raging outside, Cady finally confronts Sam in a mock trial over Sam's actions while defending Cady. Sam admits to burying the potentially exculpatory report but counters that the woman's promiscuity was no justification to raping her and that Cady is a menace. Enraged, Cady prepares to kill Sam but the storm finally causes the boat to break up, allowing Sam to gain the upper hand once the men make it to shore. He beats Cady, and is about to crush his head with a large stone, when the tide drags Cady out to sea and seemingly drowns him.
Sam washes Cady's blood off his hands, symbolically cleansing him of the crime of not giving Cady the proper assistance of counsel. At the movie's conclusion, Dani reads aloud from a chronicle she wrote of the family's ordeal that summer.
Mitchum, Peck, and Balsam all starred in the 1962 original but in different roles for the 1991 version. In the original, Mitchum was Cady and Peck was Bowden.
This was also Gregory Peck's final theatrical film.
The film was adapted by Wesley Strick from the original screenplay by James R. Webb, which was an adaptation from the novel The Executioners by John D. MacDonald.
It was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Robert De Niro) and Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Juliette Lewis). The film was a box-office success and received critical acclaim.
The film expands on the original's themes in some depth, changing relationships (the drifter Cady assaults is now a legal clerk who is in love with Nick Nolte's Bowden) and adding more complex background details. Nolte's Sam Bowden is morally flawed and, therefore, his resorting to violence is less surprising than in the original. Cady is presented as having something of a point in this film, because of Bowden's deliberate negligence of care during his original trial.
One of the major criticisms of the original film was that Gregory Peck, who played Sam Bowden, was clearly the physical superior of Robert Mitchum's Max Cady, particularly the fact that he was much taller. In this film, Nick Nolte was clearly taller than Robert DeNiro, but both respectively lost weight and developed their muscles until DeNiro was clearly the stronger man.
The film was parodied in The Simpsons episode Cape Feare.
It was also parodied in the Airplane!-like comedy Fatal Instinct.
Although a remake of the original Cape Fear, Scorsese's update is also greatly influenced by another Mitchum film, The Night of the Hunter (1955), and the work of Alfred Hitchcock (signaled by the opening credits by regular Hitchcock collaborator Saul Bass and its score by another, Bernard Herrmann).
This is also the first film Scorsese shot in the wider 2.35:1 aspect ratio, as opposed to the smaller 1.85:1 ratio in which he had filmed all his previous works.
Ostensibly in a malicious nod, Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum appear in supporting roles which a disingenuous interpretation would qualify as the logical evolution of their respective roles in the original film: Peck stars as a neurotic, Christian fundamentalist and reality-detached attorney who unwittingly defends a falsely impaired Cady, and Mitchum stars as the rather amoral police detective who suggests Bowden the possibility of using alternative means beyond legality to stop Cady.
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