> on 6/12/03 9:40 PM, William Denton at
buff@pobox.com wrote:
> Is De Niro as menacing as Mitchum [in the "Cape
Fear" remake]?
He's just as "menacing,"
yes, but the thing is that we *expect* De Niro to be
menacing, so the shock of it all isn't nearly as great.
One of the best scenes in
the '91 "Cape Fear" is when De Niro is
"making nice" -- i.e. threatening -- with the lawyer's
daughter (Juliette Lewis) at her school. It's in the school's
auditorium, where they've been rehearsing a stage version of
"Little Red Riding Hood," and we can see the set representing
Grandma's House in the background. De Niro is, clearly, The
Wolf and Lewis is Threatened Innocence -- or are they? That's
the sort of level on which the scene works.
> Are the endings the same? In the 1962 version, the
lawyer beats Cady in the
> climactic fight, but doesn't shoot him: he saves him
for the police
> and for justice.
Without giving away too
much information about it ... De Niro is given an operatic
death-scene of his own, although that death is attributable
to neither the lawyer (Nick Nolte) nor to a triumph of
justice. And then, after the death, we return to some
"voice-over" narration from Lewis, narration that's
deliberately non-emotional in the manner of young Linda Manz
in Malick's "Days of Heaven."
*
* *
I've always been fond of
the '62 "Cape Fear." When the remake came around, though, and
people started clucking their tongues, my position became:
The first one was good, yes, but it definitely had room for
improvement. Hence the virtue of the '91 version's having
Scorses, a master, rather than a hack like J. Lee Thompson at
its helm.
In a lot of ways, Version
#1 could be seen as Hitchcock Once Removed, since it had the
same studio (Universal) and composer (Bernard Herrmann) and
editor (George Tomasini) as well as at least one actor
(Martin Balsam) as
"Psycho." And the look of both films was, of course,
early-'60s b&w.
You could also, for that
matter, compare the two of 'em to another
"early'60s b&w" thriller: Blake Edwards' fine "Experiment
In Terror." In that case, it's young Stephanie Powers as a
*sister*, rather than a daughter, who's being threatened
...
*
* *
I'll continue to
express affection for the Scorsese "Cape Fear" because, among
other things, the audience gets more of a sense of the
tensions eating away at the lawyer's family before Max Cady
shows up.
(Translation: less screen-time devoted to hokey "innocence.")
That, plus the mere presence of blessed Illeana Douglas in
the Barrie Chase role, is enough to make this viewer
happy.
Chris
P.S. A Chastening Thought: The wife
in the '62 "Cape Fear," Polly Bergen, turned into the
villainess of John Waters' "Cry-Baby." Try contemplating, if
you will, the distance between those two points.
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