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"When I read Wesley Strick's script," Scorsese says, "I loved Max and hated the family -- because Max moved and they just sat there. When Wesley and I got together, I said, 'I apologize for what's about to happen to you.' We stripped the script down and built it up. Now the family is in a lot of pain. They don't trust each other. Sam has had an affair whose wounds -- his wife's, his child's, his own -- he's trying to lick and live down. Going in, he's guilty, poor guy. Leigh is watching life ebb away as she nears middle age; things are bad, and they're going to get worse. And Danny despises them both. She needs to break out from them, no matter what danger she might break into. They all need a trauma that will either bind them together or completely tear them apart. So we ran all these changes on the 'good' family. And now that they're imperfect, I love every one of them."
With equal and less complicated affection, Scorsese remembers his own extended Little Italy family -- his parents' brothers and sisters and their kids, 30 or 40 in all, gathered for holiday festas on Elizabeth Street. It was a neighborhood where the "good" people and the "bad" mingled a lot more easily than the Bowdens do with Max. "Some directors," Scorsese says, "romanticize Italian-American gangsters. First of all, where we lived there were no gangs, no Jets and Sharks; that was beneath us. Second, there + was no big difference between people who went into 'certain circles' and the rest of us. There were the guys who went off to college, the blue-collar guys and the other group, the ones who had the calling. And I shuttled among all three."
Throughout his youth, Scorsese thought he had a calling too. The future director of The Last Temptation of Christ yearned to be a priest. But another vocation beckoned. Charles and Catherine Scorsese, who today make occasional endearing cameo appearances in their son's films, took young Marty to the movies, and it was ossessione at first sight. He talks of old movies as a caliph might of all his beautiful women. So many films, so much informed love. "Watching Land of the Pharaohs as a kid, I felt I was in ancient Egypt," he recalls. "And I've been obsessed with CinemaScope since I saw The Robe at the Roxy in 1953." (Cape Fear is his first wide-screen film.) In the '70s he was one of several directors asked by a film magazine for a list of old movies that might be designated as "guilty pleasures" -- orphan films he loved. Everyone else chose 10; Scorsese came up with 125, and he wasn't even winded.
"When someone compliments me on my movies," Scorsese says, "I tell them, 'Thank you, but I bet I've seen more movies than you have, and I know what's really good. I know what I'm up against." Fair enough. But his contemporaries are up against something equally formidable: the Scorsese canon. Cape Fear is a worthy addition to it; the new film meets the challenge of starting at fever pitch and then ascending to a climax that plays like a hurricane of hysteria.