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It's true: the gang's all here. O.K., Scorsese had to be dragged kicking and equivocating into the movie; De Niro kept cajoling the director, and Spielberg, whose Amblin Entertainment produced the film, kept encouraging him to try a mainstream thriller. Even during shooting he seemed defensive. "This is only a remake," Scorsese said on the set in Florida, "an extension of the themes in the 1962 original. Look at this scene we're doing: man picks up rock, hits bad guy." But by now, as he fine-tunes Cape Fear for release next week, it is uniquely Scorsese's picture -- he couldn't sell out if he wanted to. The film is violent, excessive and, above all, entertaining; it anticipates, satisfies and then trumps the moviegoer's expectations. It plunders film history (The Night of the Hunter, Psycho, even Spielberg's shooting stars) and creates, in De Niro's character, a loner driven to impossible extremes by the voices inside him. He is brother to Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle and Raging Bull's Jake La Motta, and evil twin to Jesus in Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ.
In this remake of the 1962 sicko classic based on John D. MacDonald's novel The Executioners, the plot contours are the same: a sleazy ex-con, Max Cady, comes to a small Southern town to take his slow revenge on a lawyer who sent him to jail, and on the lawyer's vulnerable family. The basic ethical tangle remains as well: How can a good liberal fight a bad man who at first may do nothing but lurk? But now everything else is more intense, more complex. From the film's first images -- weird creatures shimmering just below sea level like monsters of the id, De Niro's eyes burning through the screen -- Cape Fear has been Bobbyized and Martyized.
In the 1962 Cape Fear, written by James R. Webb and directed by J. Lee Thompson, Robert Mitchum played Cady, and much of the movie's repellent jolt came from his look and bulk. Lounging on a street corner with his X-rated face, smirking at the fragile innocence of the lawyer's young daughter, he was a case study of "lewd vagrancy." Leaning his bare-barrel torso into a cringing Polly Bergen (the lawyer's wife), cracking a raw egg in the air and then wiping the semen-like yolk from her shoulders and breasts, caressing her, undressing her with his syrupy threats, slapping her when she can't stop wailing, he was as lurid a demon of predatory sensuality as Hollywood then dared imagine.
Mitchum was two things De Niro isn't: big and sexy. De Niro's Cady, though, has the cunning of madness. His body tattooed with Old Testament threats, he is a sleek machine of vengeance. He even has some reason for his rank righteousness. Unlike the 1962 film's lawyer (Gregory Peck), who had simply been the witness to Cady's criminal activity, this Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) was once Cady's lawyer, and he has plenty to hide. Sam, his wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) and their daughter Danny (Juliette Lewis) are no ideal family. But they are ideal marks for Cady. He is pure, they are confused. He is obsessed, they are demoralized. He is guilty, they are guilt-ridden. Whispering into the ear of Sam's secrets, Leigh's suspicions and Danny's adolescent defiance, Max is the guilty conscience in every decent person.