J Lee Thompson (1962)
All I remember from the Scorsese remake in 1991 is (a) Sally walking out in protest at the violence (this turned out to be only two minutes before the end but it’s the thought that counts) and (b) Nick Nolte slipping in a pool of blood in the kitchen of the Bowden family home, where the vengeful bogeyman Max Cady (Robert De Niro) has murdered the private detective working for Sam Bowden. I saw the original Cape Fear years before the remake appeared and I did recall being scared by the climactic fight between Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum in the dark waters of Cape Fear. J Lee Thompson’s version, from a screenplay by James R Webb (based on a 1957 novel, The Executioners by John D MacDonald), was made at a time of greater moral certainty in America, and with a star whose upstanding screen (and off-screen) persona made the invasion of the lawyer Sam Bowden’s life by the ex-con Cady a rupture of the fabric of the Hollywood universe. Preparing to see the Thompson film again, however, I thought there was a risk, with Robert Mitchum in the role of Cady, that I wouldn’t take him quite seriously enough – something of a problem for me even in a nearly great picture like The Night of the Hunter.
In fact, Mitchum’s indolence works increasingly well in Cape Fear. For much of the movie he suggests a born troublemaker rather than a sexual psychopath – but that makes Max Cady’s eventual assault on Sam Bowden’s wife Peggy (Polly Bergen) and daughter Nancy (Lori Martin) all the more startling. (These roles were played by Jessica Lange and Juliette Lewis respectively in the Scorsese film.) Robert Mitchum also gets you to believe that Cady is past caring. When, in their final confrontation, he encourages Sam to shoot him, Cady says as much and you know that he means it. In contrast, Gregory Peck’s stiff rectitude is annoying even as Sam is being menaced and his loved ones are stalked by Cady. After trying and failing to bargain with him, Sam is told by Cady what he did to his (Cady’s) ex-wife. Sam’s dismissal of him as a ‘degenerate’ in response is so pompous you feel the hero deserves what’s coming to him. Peck’s moral irreproachability is inviolable. This blurs what Sam Bowden has to resort to in order to save his family’s lives: Peck isn’t a nimble enough actor to express the ethical conflicts of a situation unless the script dramatises them explicitly, and that doesn’t happen here. Sam Bowden believes too much in justice to kill Max Cady as requested and thus finally confirms that he’s A Good Man – Gregory Peck is more comfortable with this bit. The self-righteousness of Peggy Bowden is even worse; you want to hit her when she reassures her husband that their daughter will see the ordeal through because she’s ‘pioneer stock’. There’s a striking contrast between the daughters in the two versions of Cape Fear. Juliette Lewis is sexually precocious as the renamed Danielle in the later movie. In the original, Lori Martin as Nancy looks fourteen going on thirty-five and suggests a spinster rather than a virgin.
There’s some weak plotting – the upright and supposedly vigilant Bowden parents keep doing things that put Nancy in harm’s way – and Bernard Herrmann hadn’t got Psycho out of his system when he wrote the score: J Lee Thompson’s overuse of the music serves to emphasise the gulf in quality between Hitchcock’s masterpiece and Cape Fear. Even so, I think this version is better than Scorsese’s. It’s well and frighteningly lit by Sam Leavitt and Thompson skilfully gets across the rhythms of life in the Georgia town where the story takes place, and the destruction of those rhythms. Martin Balsam and Telly Savalas both provide strong support. In the Scorsese film, Sam Bowden, as a public defender, had represented Max Cady in a rape trial but used tactics to ensure Cady’s conviction. In Thompson’s version, Sam had given evidence to the trial as a prosecution witness, having seen Cady at the scene of the crime. That’s a better idea. It makes sense that it’s what Sam did as a private citizen, rather than as a lawyer, that comes back to haunt his perfect family life.
26 November 2012
