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The way he sees the character of Sam Bowden is the key to why Martin Scorsese wanted to remake the 1962 thriller “Cape Fear.” Bowden, played by Nick Nolte , is a defense attorney who is threatened by a man from his past - a rapist who has finished a 14-year prison sentence and wants revenge for what he believes (correctly) was a lousy defense.

In the original film, Sam Bowden was a good man trying to defend his family from a madman. In the Scorsese version, Bowden is flawed and guilty, and indeed everyone in this film is weak in one way or another, and there are no heroes. That's the Scorsese touch.

The movie, filmed near Fort Lauderdale, shows Nolte at the head of a troubled family. He and his wife ( Jessica Lange ) have been through counseling because of his infidelities, and now he seems to be in the opening stages of a new affair. They live in a rambling house on a lot of land, but there isn't space enough for their daughter ( Juliette Lewis ), who hates it when they fight and locks herself in her bedroom to brood and watch MTV. This is a family with a lot of problems even before Max Cady arrives on the scene.

Cady is played by Robert De Niro , in a role filled by Robert Mitchum in 1962. Covered with tattoos spelling out dire biblical warnings, Cady is an iron-pumping redneck who learned to read in prison (“I started with Dick, Jane and Spot and went on to lawbooks”). He drives into town in a Mustang convertible and offers to teach Bowden something about the law.

And soon, everywhere Bowden looks, he sees the ominous, threatening presence of Max Cady: outside a restaurant, in a movie theater, on the wall bordering his property.

But Cady is clever and stays just this side of the law; he doesn't actually trespass, and he doesn't do physical harm to Bowden.

It's almost a game with Cady to taunt Bowden to the breaking point.

Bowden goes to the cops, to a lawyer, to a private investigator, and as he seeks help we begin to realize that no one in this universe is untainted. Among the corrupt are Mitchum, as a cop who hints that the lawyer should take the law into his own hands, and Gregory Peck , as a lawyer who represents Bowden.

What we are looking at here is a film noir version of the classic Scorsese hero, who in film after film is a man tortured by guilt and the weakness of the flesh, seeking forgiveness and redemption.

And with this new version of Max Cady, Scorsese gives us not simply a bad man, but an evil one - whose whole purpose is to show Sam Bowden he's a criminal, too.

A stratum of evil underlies the whole film and is dramatized in the character of Danielle, the Bowdens' daughter, who is going on 16 and is attracted to the menace and implied sexuality of Max Cady. It's as if she likes anybody who can bug her parents. In a tense, disturbing scene, Cady poses as a drama teacher, and Danielle goes along even after she knows who he really is - allowing herself to be verbally seduced because evil and danger are attractive to her.

Nolte's character is more complex. He is not a bad man, but not a very good one, and he finally agrees with his private eye (Joe Don Baker ) that maybe three guys should be hired to pound some sense into Max Cady. When Cady thrashes the three goons and comes looking for the Nolte character, we realize the complexity of this movie. Unlike the simplistic version of this scene we have seen in a hundred thrillers, what Scorsese gives us is a villain who has been wronged, seeking to harm a hero who has sinned.

“Cape Fear” is impressive moviemaking, showing Scorsese as a master of a traditional Hollywood genre who is able to mold it to his own themes and obsessions. But as I look at this $35 million movie with big stars, special effects and production values, I wonder whether it represents a good omen from the finest director now at work.

This is the first film in a production deal Scorsese has with Universal Studios and Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, and it represents his access to budgets much larger than those he has worked with in the past. The result seems to be a certain impersonality in a film by this most personal of directors - the Scorsese touch on a genre piece, rather than a film torn out of the director's soul. Most directors would distinguish themselves by making a film this good. From the man who made “ Taxi Driver ,” “ Raging Bull ,” “ After Hours ” and “ GoodFellas ,” this is not an advance.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Cape Fear (1991)

Rated R For Strong Violence and Language

130 minutes

Robert De Niro as Max Cady

Nick Nolte as Sam Bowden

Jessica Lange as Leigh Bowden

Juliette Lewis as Danielle Bowden

Directed by

• Martin Scorsese

Based On A Screenplay by

• James R. Webb
• Wesley Strick

Screenplay by

• The Executioners

Photographed by

• Freddie Francis

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Scorsese/De Niro revenge thriller has sexual violence.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Revenge is the primary theme, which takes the form

On the face of it, Sam is a family man who takes h

Plenty of bloody violence with the threat of sexua

A married couple have sex, but the scene is brief

Multiple uses of "f---ing" and "son of a bitch," a

A number of drinks brands are clearly depicted, mo

Multiple characters smoke cigarettes, with one tak

Parents need to know that Cape Fear is a violent revenge thriller, with references and scenes of sexual assault, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro. It is a remake of the 1962 movie of the same name. Convicted rapist Max Cady (De Niro) blames his former lawyer, Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte),…

Positive Messages

Revenge is the primary theme, which takes the form of intimidation and violence. Even those characters on the receiving end have behaved questionably, be it tampering with a court case, taking drugs, having a borderline affair, and arranging their own act of retribution.

Positive Role Models

On the face of it, Sam is a family man who takes his job as a lawyer seriously. However, it soon emerges that he is on the cusp of having an affair with a colleague -- it's also suggested he has been unfaithful in the past -- and has also buried some evidence in an earlier court case. He also behaves aggressively towards his wife and daughter as the pressure of his situation gets to him. Max is a convicted rapist. He is violent, manipulative, and obsessed on exacting revenge on Sam. Leigh is a strong woman who despite having a difficult relationship with her daughter, Danielle, would do anything to protect her. Danielle is depicted as being rebellious, smoking pot and going against her parents wishes. A police officer suggests to Sam that he should use (illegal) force to stop Max. The housekeeper, Graciela, is Latino, which plays up to racial stereotypes. A confederate flag bumper sticker is seen.

Violence & Scariness

Plenty of bloody violence with the threat of sexual assault never far away. Characters hit with pistols, pipes, and chains leaving bloody wounds and severe bruising. A character is brutally assaulted in their bed. They are handcuffed, have their arm broken, a part of their cheek bitten off, and are repeatedly punched -- the latter seen in silhouette form through a window. It emerges they were then raped. A character's throat is slit with a piano wire before being shot -- they are seen lying in a giant pool of their own blood. A family dog is poisoned. Multiple references and suggestions of rape. In one scene, a character is about to be forced to watch the rape of their spouse and child, but the perpetrator is set on fire before they can do so. A parent grabs their teenage child by the face in an aggressive manner. A married couple shake each other in an act of aggression. Various fight scenes with headlocks, headbutts, punches, head stamping, and people being hit with rocks. During a storm a boat crashes into rocks and subsequently falls apart. Character drowns.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A married couple have sex, but the scene is brief and there is no nudity. Multiple characters are seen in their underwear in non-sexual scenarios. An older character behaves inappropriately with a 15-year-old, pushing their thumb into their mouth and kissing them. The 15-year-old reciprocates before running off. A description of an "erection" from a book is retold.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Multiple uses of "f---ing" and "son of a bitch," along with "bastard," "s--t," "balls," "arse," "erection," and "damn." "Jesus" and "Christ" are also used as exclamations. Characters threaten violence, including sexual violence. A character is referred to as "white trash" on multiple occasions.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

A number of drinks brands are clearly depicted, most notably a type of water. The central family live in a grand house.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Multiple characters smoke cigarettes, with one taking it up during the course of the movie. Another character is regularly seen smoking a cigar. Two characters -- one a teen -- smoke pot together. Another character gets drunk at a bar. They are later violently and sexually attacked, which they, in part, wrongly blame on getting too drunk. Wine is seen at a dinner.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Cape Fear is a violent revenge thriller, with references and scenes of sexual assault, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro . It is a remake of the 1962 movie of the same name. Convicted rapist Max Cady (De Niro) blames his former lawyer, Sam Bowden ( Nick Nolte ), for his incarceration and is determined to make him pay. The violence is bloody and involves guns, bike chains, pipes, rocks, and a piano wire used to cut someone's throat. A woman is brutally assaulted in her bed by Max after drunkenly meeting him at a bar. She has her arm broken and part of her cheek bitten off leaving a nasty wound. She is then repeatedly punched, a scene witnessed in silhouette form. It is then revealed that Max raped her. She in part wrongly blames her drunkenness for the assault. In another scene, Max is about to rape both Sam's wife, Leigh ( Jessica Lange ) and daughter, Danielle ( Juliette Lewis ) in front of him while he's tied up. However, Danielle throws a flammable liquid on Max causing his cigar to set him on fire. Many characters smoke, with Sam taking up smoking during the course of the movie. Danielle also smokes some pot given to her by Max. There is strong language throughout including multiple use of "f--king" and "son of a bitch." Both De Niro and Lewis were Oscar nominated for their roles. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 2 parent reviews

The assaults and deaths are upsetting and Scorsese and DeNiro succeed in making the audience cringe.

What's the story.

In CAPE FEAR, lawyer Sam Bowden ( Nick Nolte ) seemingly lives a comfortable life with his wife, Leigh ( Jessica Lange ) and daughter, Danielle ( Juliette Lewis ). That is until Max Cady ( Robert De Niro ) a newly released convict -- who Sam defended 14 years ago -- turns up determined to exact revenge.

Is It Any Good?

With its dramatic score to a shirtless, heavily-tattooed De Niro exercising in his prison cell, the mood for this violent revenge thriller is set in its opening scene. There's no slow buildup here. Nolte's North Carolina lawyer, Sam Bowden may have forgotten who De Niro's convicted rapist Max Cady is, but Max sure hasn't forgotten who he blames for his incarceration. After being released, Max heads straight to Sam's town to exact 14 years worth of payback. Subtle it's not, but then Cape Fear doesn't pretend to be. The violence is full-on and the sense of danger -- including a constant threat of sexual violence -- is deliberately unsettling.

The movie marks the seventh time Martin Scorsese and De Niro worked together and the trust between the two is evident. De Niro cranks it up to 10. A lesser director might have reined in his leading man, but here he allows De Niro to portray Max as an unhinged menace capable of extreme acts of violence at any given moment. The actor was rewarded with an Oscar nomination, as was Lewis as the rebellious Danielle -- the most likable of all the characters. Film buffs will also get a thrill seeing actors from the original 1962 version -- including Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck -- crop up in this remake. Cape Fear is far from Scorsese's best work. It's also an uncomfortable watch, which is exactly what it sets out to be.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the extreme and sexual violence in Cape Fear . Why do you think Scorsese chose to make the violence so intense and bloody? Why did he include a rape scene? What effect does it have on the movie overall?

Sam withheld some evidence at Max's trial. Why did he do this? Can you understand why he did? Discuss the idea that everyone deserves a fair trial.

This film marks the seventh collaboration between Scorsese and De Niro. What are the advantages of working with someone you know so well? What are the disadvantages? What's your favorite Scorsese/De Niro movie, and why?

The movie is a remake of a 1962 film. How do the two compare? In general, what do you think of remakes?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 15, 1991
• On DVD or streaming : August 23, 2005
• Cast : Robert De Niro , Nick Nolte , Jessica Lange
• Director : Martin Scorsese
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Thriller
• Run time : 128 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong violence, and for language
• Last updated : September 9, 2023

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‘cape fear’: thr’s 1991 review.

On Nov. 15, 1991, Universal unveiled Martin Scorsese's thriller in theaters.

By Duane Byrge

Duane Byrge

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On Nov. 15, 1991, Universal unveiled Martin Scorsese’s thriller Cape Fear in theaters, where it would go on to gross $182 million globally. The film was nominated for two Oscars at the 64th Academy Awards, for Robert De Niro in the best actor category and Juliette Lewis as best supporting actress. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review is below.

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Scorsese fans, especially the serioso cineaste types, may discern that the talented, ambitious director is likely pacing himself with this generic exercise; nevertheless, Cape Fear  is too bare bones to please the sophisticated audiences who relish Scorsese’s underbelly thrusts.

They are likely to be unmoved by this stylish but thin stalker story. Chart some initially raging business around this Cape  before it quickly descends into a box office quagmire.

In this meticulously crafted, but psychologically underfleshed thriller, Scorsese has performed a textbook execution of a mad stalker story: Ex-con Max Cady (De Niro) shows up in a sleepy Southern town to methodically harass his former lawyer, Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte), whose lax defense caused Max a harsh, 14-year sentence.

Muscled to the max and crazed with the grandeur of a god complex, Harry seeks his vengeance. He’s a wily devil, insidiously and seductively tapping into the fears and disruptions of Bowden’s flawed family life.

Cape Fear  never properly submerges to its full-blown character depths. Scorsese has only skimmed the surface of psychological terror here, merely casting his directorial line upon the generic waters and never hooking the big, deep and dark stuff.

Unfortunately, in addition to Nolte’s thinly drawn role, Jessica Lange is wasted as merely a connective character, an imprecisely drawn mother-wife malcontent. Perhaps providing the strongest real counterbalance to De Niro’s crazy Cady is Juliette Lewis, whose gangly packed performance as the couple’s disenchanted 15-year-old daughter shows the most sinewy fiber.

Smash cuts, rhythmic zooms as well as a wellspring of technical flourishes (including a shimmeringly eerie title sequence), pulse and punctuate with steady, coursing energy. Depths of praise to editor Thelma Schoonmaker, director of photography Freddie Francis, title-ists Elaine and Saul Bass, and sound mixer Tod Maitland for the surging undercurrents on Cape Fear . — Duane Byrge, originally published Nov. 11, 1991. 

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Review/Film; De Niro as Revenge Seeker In Scorsese's 'Cape Fear'

By Vincent Canby

• Nov. 13, 1991

Film cultists, here are your hats.

Martin Scorsese's "Cape Fear," a remake of J. Lee Thompson's very popular 1962 suspense melodrama about an ex-con and the family he terrorizes, is new and improved and, from time to time, so fiendishly funny that it qualifies as a horror film.

At one point this "Cape Fear" slips in its own blood, but instead of falling on its face, it achieves a new high in audience-friendly sadism. Among the film's other double-edged virtues is the way in which it pays homage to the original while, in passing, it points out everything that's wrong with it.

One should not be too appalled by what Mr. Scorsese and his collaborators are up to here. Most remakes are of movies that have some claim to singularity. Not this one.

The best thing about the Thompson "Cape Fear" (which remains ever popular in the video market) is Robert Mitchum's bewitching, lazily menacing performance as the vengeful convict. Yet even Mr. Mitchum's evil grace as an actor cannot disguise the fact that the movie is a piece of Swiss cheese.

The 1962 "Cape Fear" is a mechanical if slick exercise in fright, the kind of film for which characters have been unashamedly bent to fit the wild events they are supposed to make credible.

Mr. Scorsese and Wesley Strick, who wrote the new film, closely follow the outline of the original James R. Webb screenplay. Though their "Cape Fear" is no more realistic or socially significant than Mr. Thompson's, it moves with the same merciless melodramatic momentum as Mr. Scorsese's "Goodfellas." The film is sleight of hand of high order and, at carefully calculated moments, a blunt shocker.

Unlike the original, this "Cape Fear" doesn't pretend to be a picture of paradise in peril. It is apparent from the beginning that all is not well with the members of the Bowden family. They are perfect targets for all the terrible things that happen to them -- if not, to a certain extent, actually responsible for them.

The setting is a small city in the Deep South called New Essex. Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte), a successful lawyer, has a roving eye. Though he may not be unfaithful in fact, his wife, Leigh (Jessica Lange), seethes with resentment, which is all the more maddening because she still likes to sleep with him.

Whether it's love or not is difficult to tell, especially for their ripe, pretty 15-year-old daughter, Danielle (Juliette Lewis). She seems to be a naturally loving and sweet-natured child but, around her parents, she is a rude, frowning, old-for-her-age presence. Their furious fights and reconciliations lead nowhere. They also exclude her.

The Bowdens are on their way to being seriously dysfunctional when Max Cady (Robert De Niro), smiling, small-eyed and mean, arrives in New Essex clad in a newly paroled con's idea of sharp leisure-wear. He's a visual joke, but he drives a snappy red convertible and carries murder in his heart. On his arms, below the short sleeves of his Hawaiian shirt, are some of the tattoos he acquired during his imprisonment: names of women, Bibical quotations, doodles.

On his back, unseen most of the time, is a huge black cross from which dangle the scales of justice. Max is a zealot with a most specific mission, which is to get even with Sam Bowden. It seems that 14 years earlier, Sam, acting as Max's defense lawyer, suppressed evidence that might have cleared Max of rape and battery charges.

Sam's explanation is that the crime was so brutal, and Max so clearly psychotic, that the safety of the community justified his action. The action was also made easier by the fact that Max was then illiterate. While in prison Max not only got himself tattooed, but he also taught himself to read, starting with "Spot Goes to the Farm" and working his way up to books on law.

Max is as clever as he is mad. He begins to haunt Sam in ways that menace but aren't legally actionable or can't be traced to him. The family dog is poisoned, though that could have been done by anybody. One of Sam's close friends is attacked but refuses to press charges. Then Max goes after the unhappy, bewildered Danielle.

Posing as her new drama teacher, he telephones Danielle and asks her to meet him the next afternoon on the stage in the school auditorium. The sequence that follows is as haunting as anything Mr. Scorsese has ever directed. It's not a chase but a seduction, the wolf coming on to Red Riding Hood with talk of Henry Miller and offers of marijuana and sympathy.

Though Danielle recognizes Max, she is willingly implicated in his scheme. It is one of Mr. De Niro's finest moments. It also reveals Miss Lewis to be a new young actress of stunning possibilities. The sequence is the heart of the movie.

"Cape Fear" goes on, relentlessly, up and over the melodramatic top in a succession of highly effective but far more conventional cat-and-mouse games, including one that recalls "Psycho." Blood flows freely, bodies accumulate in reckless numbers, while Max becomes even harder to dispatch than Rasputin.

Mr. Nolte, looking new and lean and virtually born again, and Miss Lange do very well in the not initially promising roles played by Gregory Peck and Polly Bergen in the original. Mr. Peck himself shows up to give a brief but surprisingly effective performance as Max's lawyer, a handsome, string-tied old Southern gentleman who is probably as crooked as they come.

Mr. Mitchum and Martin Balsam, also of the original cast, are on hand, too, in effect to bless the new venture.

Freddie Francis, the gifted English cameraman who has directed his own stylish horror films ("Dr. Terror's House of Horrors"), was the cinematographer. Preserved more or less intact, though not quite as overwhelming as it once was, is Bernard Herrmann's musical score for the original film, adapted, arranged and conducted by Elmer Bernstein.

Mr. Scorsese is having fun with "Cape Fear," at heart a shaggy-dog story, but he brings to it the same manic intensity and innovative techniques evident in his more solemn work. "Cape Fear" is pure make-believe. Among other things, the South it inhabits looks to be almost completely white.

Stay away if you're squeamish but, if you do, you'll miss an essential work by one of our masters, as well as two of the year's most accomplished performances, those of Mr. De Niro and Ms. Lewis.

"Cape Fear," which has been rated R (U nder 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian), has a lot of violence, blood and vulgar language. Cape Fear Directed by Martin Scorsese; screenplay by Wesley Strick, based on a screenplay by James R. Webb and the novel "The Executioners" by John D. MacDonald; director of photography, Freddie Francis; edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; music by Bernard Herrmann, adapted by Elmer Bernstein; production designer, Henry Bumstead; produced by Barbara De Fina; released by Universal Pictures. At the Coronet, Third Avenue at 59th Street, Manhattan. Running time: 123 minutes. This film is rated R. Max Cady . . . Robert De Niro Sam Bowden . . . Nick Nolte Leigh Bowden . . . Jessica Lange Danielle Bowden . . . Juliette Lewis Claude Kersek . . . Joe Don Baker Lieutenant Elgart . . . Robert Mitchum Lee Heller . . . Gregory Peck The Judge . . . Martin Balsam

• Universal Pictures

Summary Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake of J. Lee Thompson's 1962 thriller. (Universal/Amblin)

Directed By : Martin Scorsese

Written By : John D. MacDonald, James R. Webb, Wesley Strick

Where to Watch

Robert De Niro

Jessica Lange

Leigh bowden.

Juliette Lewis

Danielle bowden.

Joe Don Baker

Claude kersek.

Robert Mitchum

Lieutenant elgart.

Gregory Peck

Martin Balsam

Illeana Douglas

Fred Thompson

Tom broadbent, zully montero, craig henne, forest burton, edgar allan poe iv, w. paul bodie, joel kolker, corrections officer.

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De Niro Unleashed: Looking Back on ‘Cape Fear’ 30 Years Later

Martin Scorsese wasn’t supposed to remake the 1962 thriller, but when he did, he brought along his longtime muse and infused the story with an overwhelming amount of trademark chaos

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It was supposed to be Steven Spielberg . In 1990, coming off a pair of burnished literary epics ( The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun ) and a hit Indiana Jones sequel, the director decided to remake J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 thriller Cape Fear with Robert De Niro in the lead. But then he backed out, stating that the project was “too violent.” A swap was arranged: Spielberg would cede the production to his and De Niro’s old pal Martin Scorsese, suddenly flush from Goodfellas after a decade in director jail; in return, Spielberg reclaimed the rights to Schindler’s List , a passion project he’d previously offered to Scorsese in the late 1980s.

For Spielberg, the end results of the trade were undeniable: an all-time Auteur Twofer in 1993 between the Oscars juggernaut Schindler’s List and the record-setting Jurassic Park , whose production was also made possible by handing off Cape Fear . As for Scorsese, while Cape Fear broke through as the highest-grossing movie of his career to date, it was not seen as an unqualified triumph. In fact, the suspicion amongst even his greatest champions was that its glossy, gory contents represented a form of selling out. “As I look at this $35 million movie with big stars, special effects, and production values, I wonder if it represents a bad omen from the finest director now at work,” wrote Roger Ebert, whose sentiments were echoed even more skeptically by Sight and Sound ’s J. Hoberman: “More than a critic’s darling, Scorsese is a national treasure,” Hoberman opined . “We need him. He needs a hit. Cape Fear is a semi-sacrifice to that faith.”

It is, of course, fun to imagine what Spielberg’s Cape Fear would have looked like, and whether a filmmaker renowned for his populist impulses would have gotten a warmer reception churning out a buttery-popcorn thriller. Actually, the movie Spielberg did release in 1991, Hook , could be said to be his Cape Fear : a sentimental character study of a middle-aged man who’s taken his family for granted and has to be taught a lesson in responsibility by a shady adversary from his past. There’s even a final showdown on a boat. What surely drew Spielberg to Thompson’s original film, itself adapted from John D. MacDonald’s 1957 suspense novel The Executioners , was its tale of a suburban family under siege—a setup the director had used over and over again in the 1980s. Spielberg’s genius was always in capturing the intrusion of the fantastic on the everyday, close encounters with extraterrestrials, poltergeists, gremlins, and other marauding forces challenging the stability of the domestic unit. And while Cape Fear ’s antagonist, Max Cady, was very much human—an ex-con making a beeline for the lawyer who helped convict him—he also represented an opportunity for Spielberg to transfer his vision of insatiable, predatory villains (the truck in Duel ; the shark in Jaws ) into a flesh-and-blood vessel.

The extreme violence in Wesley Strick’s screenplay—throat slashings, stabbings, and a character burned alive—that threw Spielberg for a loop placed Cape Fear 2.0 in Quentin Tarantino’s ’90s. But the way that the screenplay complicates the Manichaean morality of its black-and-white predecessor is what ultimately kept Spielberg at bay. Strick’s conception of a Cape Fear with plenty of sin to go around was simply a better fit for Scorsese, who used it to fill out his rogues’ gallery of obsessive, magnetic antiheroes.

Thompson’s Cape Fear ( currently streaming on Criterion Channel) is a slick, atmospheric piece of work—a superior early-’60s genre piece made under the sign of Alfred Hitchcock and featuring evocative waterfront locations. (The title refers to a headland off the coast of North Carolina.) It’s also sociopolitically suggestive in the extreme, with Max Cady as a rapist hiding behind the law, crowing about his civil liberties as he encroaches on the Bowdens’ private property and makes passes at his enemy’s underage daughter. “People think I have an interesting walk,” Robert Mitchum once quipped, “but I’m just trying to hold my gut in.” All self-deprecation aside, few actors could use their body so deftly to create a character, and Cape Fear showcases Mitchum’s sinewy minimalism. His Max Cady slouches and stretches out like he owns whatever place he enters, including police interrogation rooms; when strip-searched, he doesn’t hold anything in but lets his lanky physique hang out. Like the malevolent preacher Mitchum played a few years earlier in Night of the Hunter , Cady’s creepiness is so overt—and so in contrast to Gregory Peck’s upstanding posture and manner as the put-upon attorney Sam Bowden— that the audience’s dread becomes mixed with excitement. He’s the most enjoyable thing on-screen, but he’s never, ever sympathetic; even though Mitchum patented cool like few other actors of his era, he didn’t confuse it with evil.

By casting De Niro as Cady, Scorsese not only evoked the spectre of the pair’s previous collaborations—a lineup of psychopaths from Travis Bickle to Jake LaMotta to Rupert Pupkin—but he also tapped the same vein of audience manipulation and complicity that Stanley Kubrick had by siccing Jack Nicholson on the wife and kids in The Shining. Some actors are just impossible to hate, even when their skills are being used in the service of hatefulness. De Niro—even more jacked up than in Raging Bull , slathered in fake sweat and tattoos and boasting a Southern accent somewhere in the vicinity of Foghorn Leghorn—swaps out Mitchum’s plausible monstrosity for something feral, grotesque, and hilarious. He delivers some of the wildest acting of his career—enough to earn him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, which he subsequently lost to a subtler but similarly scene-chewing performance by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs .

Like Hannibal Lecter, Max Cady’s insidious charisma has the power to demagnetize the audience’s moral compass. In what’s probably Cape Fear ’s signature scene, Max—who has not yet made his presence and intentions known to Nick Nolte’s Sam, reimagined here not as a prosecutor but a former advocate who buried exculpatory evidence—plunks himself down at the multiplex in front of the Bowdens and ruins their viewing of Problem Child with howls of theatrical laughter. It’s obnoxious, sure, but because it’s De Niro, it’s a virtuosic display of obnoxiousness. That braying laughter sets a startling, seriocomic tone that Scorsese plays with both purposefully and recklessly for the rest of the film—first daring us to snicker at his own irreverent approach to old-fashioned melodrama, and then again to still feel scandalized and brutalized despite all that wild, daredevil moviemaking energy.

It’s not enough to say that Scorsese’s take on Cape Fear is stylish. It’s more like a guy trying to pile as much style as possible to see if the foundation will hold or collapse under the weight, at which point you’d expect him to keep whipping the camera through the wreckage. The most seismic impact comes courtesy of Bernard Herrmann’s blaring score, repurposed (and reorchestrated by Elmer Bernstein) from the 1962 film in a way that deepens its ominous, Gothic sense of portent. In another Hitchcock connection, Scorsese uses the music over titles designed by Psycho ’s credit maestro Saul Bass , including a shot of a hovering hawk that’s pregnant with predatory subtext. More than any Scorsese movie of the ’90s, Cape Fear feels anxious, jittery, on the verge of splitting apart; some sequences have the nervy, jagged energy of Oliver Stone. Freddie Francis’s cinematography is awash in electric, expressionistic streaks of color, which feel aligned—strategically, and also unsettlingly—with Max’s character. Perched on the fence outside the Bowdens’ sprawling McMansion, De Niro is seen silhouetted against popping Fourth of July fireworks —an All-American peeping tom enjoying the view.

The running joke is that Max, who’s spent over a decade in prison, is using his family’s inheritance to indulge in an off-the-rack flamboyance that rubs his freedom in Sam’s face. (He dresses like a candy-colored dandy, topping off his most garish getups with a jaunty beret.) The contrast between Max’s appearance and his backwoods heritage is made even funnier by the fact that Nolte—who’d mostly been cast as a roughneck at this point in his career—plays the lawyer as a model of buttoned-down, upper-middle-class restraint. In the original, the audience is fully behind Peck’s Sam as he gears up to protect his loved ones from a bad man with a grudge; here, Sam’s barely tamped-down smarminess is insinuated from the beginning. He keeps getting terser and less sympathetic, in sync with his own guilty conscience. He recognizes that his own dereliction of duty, while not equal to his ex-client’s rap sheet, at least exists on the same continuum of wrongdoing. And he hates himself for it.

From Mean Streets to Raging Bull to Silence , guilt is the lifeblood of Scorsese’s cinema, and Sam is a man who feels it from all angles: not only in his transgressions against Max Cady, but also in infidelities against his wife, Leigh (Jessica Lange), and his overprotective, quasi-incestuous fixation on his teenage daughter, Danielle (Juliette Lewis). It’s in the female characters that Scorsese veers furthest from his inspiration, transforming the bland bystanders of the original into active, seething participants in the hothouse drama. An image of Max sitting on a fence in the family’s yard is shot from Leigh’s perspective with the humidity of a wet dream. Later, when he comes by the house (without introducing himself), Lange plays her character’s suspicion and disgust with a barely suppressed desirous edge. And the Oscar-nominated Lewis throws herself fully into a subplot about Dani’s ripening sexuality, an irresistible force in search of an immovable object. She holds her own with De Niro in a lurid, uncomfortable seduction scene set against the exaggerated backdrop of a high school play’s fairy-tale set. The sequence is all about Max exulting in his own bizarro sensual power over an inexperienced teenager, and Scorsese drags out the bad vibes until they become excruciating. De Niro’s abrupt, mumbled exit comes at once as a relief and a twist of the knife as Lewis crumples into tears.

Where Cape Fear either spins out of control or explodes into lurid, no-holds-barred brilliance is in the escalating shows of hostility between the two men. Frustrated by Max’s ability to evade police charges or intimidation by a private eye (Joe Don Baker, chugging Pepto-Bismol), Sam hires some goons to lay into him with tire irons and bicycle chains. Skulking nearby in order to get a front row seat to the beating, he ends up cowering behind a dumpster after Max overwhelms the thugs. He’s a beta male reduced to playing hide-and-seek, denied the vicarious satisfaction of vigilante justice. It’s thus downright hilarious when De Niro’s indestructible shit-kicker pantomimes frailty for a local judge while taking out a restraining order on Sam, and funnier still that his own lawyer is played by Gregory Peck, who’s doing a self-satirical riff on the moral authority he embodied in both Cape Fear and To Kill a Mockingbird . (For symmetry’s sake, Mitchum is on hand as well in a cameo as a sympathetic local cop.)

Because De Niro inhabits Max’s vengeance with such gallows humor, there are moments when Cape Fear almost seems to be treading into parody—a quality picked up and slam-dunked into immortality by the writers of The Simpsons , whose fifth season masterpiece “Cape Feare” stands as perhaps the show’s most dazzling, sustained, single-episode tribute. In the same way that pop musicians often claimed they knew they’d really made it after Weird Al rewrote one of their hits, The Simpsons once served as a bellwether of pop-cultural worthiness, and by essentially re-creating Scorsese’s film bit by bit, “Cape Feare” confirmed how deeply its source material had touched a nerve.

The scene late in Cape Fear when Max unbuckles himself from the bottom of the Bowdens’ station wagon and cleans up in a rest stop bathroom is peak De Niro: He’s sinister, abject, and weirdly narcissistic all at once, slicking his long hair back with engine grease. In the film’s home stretch, the character becomes a shape-shifter, impersonating the Bowdens’ Hispanic maid in order to murder Baker’s investigator (a shock reveal pitched halfway between comedy and horror) and finally infiltrating their houseboat as a fallen, avenging angel, stripped to the waist and babbling in tongues. Is it too much? Probably, and there’s something about Cape Fear ’s melodramatic, rain-filled climax that justifies Ebert and Hoberman’s carping that Scorsese was either defeated by or deferential to expectations of scale; as extreme and eccentric as his earlier thrillers had been, they’d never stooped to this kind of climax. But the artist in Scorsese still bleeds through: The shot of Nolte’s Sam gazing at his bloody hands after dispatching his rival is a brilliantly Catholic sight gag—the everyman catching himself red-handed. Sam rubs his hands clean, but the stain—of Max Cady, and his own transgressions—won’t come out in the wash.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.

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Classic Movie Review: ‘Cape Fear’ (1991)

[READ FULL BIO]

CAPE FEAR (1991) – Review by Terrence Rafferty [The New Yorker]

• October 25, 2017

by Terrence Rafferty

Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear is a remake of a bluntly effective 1962 thriller about a middle-class family— husband, wife, teenage daughter—who are terrorized by a devious, implacable psychopath. This looks like Scorsese’s attempt to make a crowd-pleasing commercial film, to apply his intense, kinetic style to the relatively undemanding job of scaring audiences out of their wits. The movie is a disgrace: an ugly, incoherent, dishonest piece of work. The original picture, directed by a skillful journeyman, J. Lee Thompson, is memorable without being especially artful. Thompson’s movie (adapted, by James R. Webb, from a John D. MacDonald pulp novel called The Executioners ) is no-frills suspense. The story couldn’t be simpler. An ex- con named Max Cady arrives in a Southern town in search of the man he holds responsible for his imprisonment, the lawyer Sam Bowden. There’s no doubt that Cady is out for revenge. We understand that his dedication to his task is utterly single-minded, but he’s too smart to do anything that would allow the authorities to lock him up or run him out of town; he conveys his intentions to Bowden through suggestions and insinuations rather than explicit threats. Calmly and cruelly, he does everything he can to undermine Bowden’s sense of security. From the moment Cady appears in town, Bowden is constantly aware of him. Cady is furtive and unscrupulous, and he has the unnerving quick-strike elusiveness of a guerrilla fighter—the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t quality that can give human malevolence the aura of the demonic. He’s a monster, a bogeyman, and the original Cape Fear has the straight-ahead construction of a horror movie. It aims low, meaning only to produce the most fundamental. uncomplicated sort of tension: There’s something out there; we don’t know how to stop it; here it comes again. Bowden (played by Gregory Reck in his best pillar-of-rectitude manner) is so civilized and rational that initially he is almost helpless against Cady’s animal cunning; as the movie goes along, though, his rock-solid principles erode, and what replaces them is a fierce, basic instinct to defend himself and his family by whatever means may be necessary.

Like all truly scary movies, the original Cape Fear is essentially conservative, even reactionary. It works by evoking the childish, primal fears that are strong enough to override reason, moral discrimination, faith in the social contract —to make every consideration other than that of survival seem irrelevant, effete. A good part of the horror that movies of this sort induce is horror at the baseness and violence of our own reactions; we feel as if we had regressed to some primitive state of consciousness. For an educated middle-class audience —those of us. that is, who are meant to identify with the besieged Bowden family —the original Cape Fear is the guiltiest pleasure imaginable, more shameful than pornography; it brings out the vigilante, the redneck, the caveman lurking inside our liberal-humanist selves. There’s a strange purity to the dishonorable intentions of Thompson’s picture: It frames the conflict in the starkest terms and proceeds inexorably from there, without bothering to provide the distractions of wit, imagination, or psychological nuance. Its terrifying momentum is fueled by our fascination with Robert Mitchum’s Cady. Mitchum is amazing; he uses all his customary mannerisms for profoundly disturbing effects. The danger that Cady poses to the Bowden family is largely sexual: The crime he was sent up for was the rape of a teenage girl, and his plan for revenge clearly includes the violation of Bowden’s daughter. Mitchum’s characteristic air of relaxed masculine confidence takes on really foul overtones in Cape Fear . His star power has always depended on the hint of sexual threat expressed by his drawling, ambling, heavy-lidded presence. Here his lazy machismo is appalling, and yet, unsettlingly, he’s still attractive. He is the sole source of excitement in Cape Fear , and a constant reminder that the pleasure we’re deriving from this brutal thriller is corrupt, helplessly perverse. There’s a remarkable scene near the end of the picture in which Cady, who has traced the Bowdens to a houseboat on the Cape Fear River, peels off his shirt and slips quietly into the water, hoping to sneak up on his prey. In the moonlight, he looks simultaneously like a gleaming, bare-chested stud, a grimly determined commando, and some sort of prehistoric reptile—a cold-blooded predator that we thought had disappeared from the earth a few geological ages ago.

The 1962 Cape Fear isn’t complex —morally, psychologically, or cinematically. The picture makes a mockery of the very notion of complexity; it’s constructed to dissolve all emotional and intellectual distinctions, to throw everything back into the undifferentiated primal ooze of terror and survival. This is not an admirable aim. but the movie certainly has the courage of its low convictions: It never pretends that what it’s doing is good for us. Scorsese’s remake muddies the waters with self-consciousness. He has loaded Cape Fear with apparent moral ambiguities, facile ideas about guilt and redemption (themes that link the movie, forcibly, to his previous work), and explicit attempts to portray his scuzzy villain as a mythic nemesis. In the new script (which is credited to Wesley Strick), the Bowdens aren’t innocent victims of an irrational evil. The seeds of evil are within them, and Cady no longer seems to have come out of nowhere like a hurricane, an unforeseeable natural disaster; in this picture, he appears to have sprung forth from the Bowdens’ dirty little souls. Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) isn’t quite the straight arrow he was in the first movie. He once almost wrecked his marriage with his philandering, we learn, and it’s not clear that he has entirely reformed: He’s enjoying a heavy flirtation with a law clerk named Lori (Illeana Douglas) — a relationship teetering between friendship and romance. And he isn’t a paragon of legal integrity, either. The basis of Cady’s grudge against him has been changed from that of the original story. In the novel and the 1962 film, Bowden witnessed Cady’s assault on the teenager and gave testimony in court. In the new version, Bowden has not witnessed the crime; he was Cady’s defense attorney in the rape trial, and he suppressed evidence that could have led to his client’s acquittal. Bowden’s wife. Leigh (Jessica Lange), is now an edgy, unhappy-looking woman; she hasn’t forgiven her husband for his past infidelities, and she’s quick to accuse him of new ones. Fifteen-year-old Danielle Bowden (Juliette Lewis), Cady’s ultimate prey, has been given a sullen, pouty teenage sexuality, and she’s alienated from her parents. She’s more repelled by the hostile vibes between Sam and Leigh than she is by Cady’s advances to her. In one long, loathsome scene, Cady, posing as Danielle’s new drama teacher, comes perilously close to seducing her. Halfway into the sequence, she secs through the impersonation and realizes that this man is her family’s tormentor, but she isn’t turned off*; she kisses him anyway. And this Cady (Robert De Niro) is more than a sadistic, amoral cracker; he is also an avenging angel (his body is covered with tattooed biblical quotations like “Vengeance Is Mine” and with Christian symbols like the cross) and the trickster figure common to many of the world’s mythologies.

Of course, educated middle-class moviegoers like a little subtext in a genre picture: It adds spice. Picking up intimations of dark psychological “truths.” identifying mythic patterns and narrative archetypes — these arc ways of making ourselves feel smart while we enjoy dumb movies, of asserting our superiority to gut-level, cheap-thrills storytelling. They’re also ways of neutralizing the visceral, wholly irrational kick of powerhouse trash like the original Cape Fear : they enable us to dismiss the damning evidence of our emotional reactions —to deny that we’ve been lured, momentarily, into wholehearted acceptance of some pretty crude notions. Thompson’s Cape Fear turns the audience as well as the hero into yahoos, and it doesn’t supply us with any convenient excuses for our feelings. It ends, after a climactic battle in which Sam vanquishes the monster, with a brief, bleak shot of the Bowdens, their faces expressing exhaustion and degradation rather than triumph. The new Cape Fear is ail excuses. You couldn’t say that Scorsese’s treatment is a desecration of a great, pure work of the human spirit; it’s more like a consecration of something debased and profane. This Cape Fear is much flashier and more assaultive than the original (and it’s also, at two hours and eight minutes, a hell of a lot longer), but the Christian/mythological subtext that Scorsese dredges up and places in the foreground has the effect of increasing our emotional distance from the story. And it isn’t true subtext; it’s stuff that has been imposed on, rather than discovered in, the material. The idea that Cady is a monster who has bubbled up out of the unconscious of a dysfunctional family seems at first to be just glib, fashionable pop psychology. As the movie goes along, though. Scorsese keeps hammering away at the Bowdens’ frailties, and it becomes harder and harder to ignore the implication that they somehow deserve the vengeance that’s being visited on them. There’s a gruesome sequence in which Cady picks up Lori. the law clerk, in a bar and then handcuffs her in bed and beats her senseless, and the movie gives us to understand that Sam is indirectly responsible for this atrocity: Lori allowed herself to be seduced by Cady because she was frustrated by the unsatisfying ambiguity of her relationship with Sam. In this movie, flirting with a coworker can leave a guy with blood on his hands And what makes the long scene between Cady and Danielle so surpassingly ugly is that it turns the normal confused sexuality of a teenage girl into something unclean: As Danielle begins to respond to the advances of her would-be rapist, the movie unavoidably suggests that she, like the unfortunate Lori, is asking for it.

There’s no way to recast this story in Christian terms without reducing it to moral (and aesthetic) nonsense. The stain of original sin on the Bowdens’ souls seems to justify Cady’s viciousness. Sam’s breach of legal ethics in his conduct of Cady’s defense makes the lawyer’s later descent, first into shady extralegal tactics and then into plain violence, seem far less dramatic. The whole story is now constructed to illustrate the Christian idea that suffering is good for the soul: Battling Cady provides a kind of spiritual catharsis for the Bowdens. In the end. they’ve been reborn: They’ve wrestled with the demons of their corrupt natures and exorcised them, spewed the poison out of their mouths. If that devil, that tattooed man. had not come along. Lord knows what might have become of these lost children; they would still be wandering in the wilderness of sin. The Christian implications that Scorsese lays on this elemental story actually serve to make the message more reactionary: Violence is no longer just a matter of survival —it’s now the instrument of salvation. (If Scorsese were making Taxi Driver today, would he present Travis Bickle’s spooky calm in the aftermath of the massacre without irony, as if this serenity were a sign of grace?) These ideas may be among Scorsese’s most deeply held convictions, but they aren’t integral to this kind of movie or this particular story. The new Cape Fear is still, at heart, a picture whose sole aim is to give its audience huge, bowel-loosening shocks; the veneer of moral seriousness and psychological complexity that Scorsese brings to the enterprise feels like an attempt to convince himself that he’s not doing what he’s doing.

It’s hard to find the pleasure, or value, in a horror picture that keeps providing us with high-toned justifications for our basest reactions — insisting that the grueling experience it’s putting us through is really meant to edify us. De Niro’s frenetic but thoroughly uninteresting performance is emblematic of the movie’s inadequacy. He’s covered with tattooed messages and symbols, but he doesn’t seem to have a body. We could feel Mitchum’s evil in all its slimy physicality; De Niro’s is an evil that we merely read. Despite the movie’s relentless pace and the ingenious staging and editing of its violent sequences. Cape Fear has a peculiarly antiseptic quality. It drags us into the mud and then tells us that we haven’t got dirty. Our messy primitive responses have been cleaned up, rationalized away; we’re guilt free—washed in the blood of the bogeyman. The pretense of moral purity in Scorsese’s Cape Fear is far more sordid than the honest, un-self-conscious shockmongering of the original. Scorsese seems to want to make a gut-wrenching thriller and yet duck the responsibility for the sleazy thoughts it might churn up in us. He’s asking absolution for the wrong sin. He shouldn’t be ashamed of having made a mass-audience horror movie; he should be ashamed of having made one that sends its viewers home feeling morally complacent and intellectually superior.

The New Yorker , December 2, 1991

• More: Cape Fear (1991) , Martin Scorsese , Movie reviews , Terrence Rafferty , The New Yorker

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Cape Fear Reviews

There is some efficient terror-business in the film, but the suspicion that a meal is being made of your cringing stomach and your glazed eyeballs isn't very endearing. Nor is the brutal retributive climax.

Full Review | Mar 9, 2024

A sturdy, frightening thriller, with Robert Mitchum in a powerhouse turn.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Nov 29, 2022

[Mitchum] makes the nice folks look weak and unconvincing. But then the story as a whole isn't realistic -- though it goes into unnecessary and distasteful detail.

Full Review | Dec 15, 2020

The film gets all the beats right; the situations alternate between nerve-wracking and infuriating and horrifying, all while the pacing stays precise.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 24, 2020

It's clear virtually from the get-go that Cape Fear's success is due almost entirely to Mitchum's absolutely spellbinding turn as the vile antagonist...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 3, 2020

Its politics are abhorrent to me, but my god, it's such a slick, well-crafted thriller ... that I can't hate it

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 18, 2008

Unpleasant but suspenseful film noir.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jan 23, 2007

A tense thriller that holds your attention to the very end. The film is aided by one of Bernard Hermann's better scores.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 24, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 7, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 2, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 24, 2005

A cold-blooded, calculated build-up of sadistic menace and shivering dread is accomplished with frightening adroitness in J. Lee Thompson's melodrama Cape Fear.

Full Review | May 9, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 4, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 8, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 21, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 1, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 6, 2003

Keep-you-up-all-night terrifying!

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 7, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 9, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 23, 2002

Cape Fear Review

15 Nov 1991

105 minutes

Later remade by Martin Scorsese and as a Sideshow Bob episode of The Simpsons, this imitation Hitchcock thriller is a classic almost by default, with an appropriately uptight hero performance from Peck and merely good direction by long‑time journeyman J. Lee Thompson outweighed by a sure‑fire thriller premise (from John D. MacDonald's novel The Executioners) and the second‑best‑ever (after Night of the Hunter) Robert Mitchum villain performance.

Mitchum is seething but subtle as the insolent, insouciant animal, smiling and chomping on a cigar as he flaunts legal smarts picked up in the joint, laying out plans for a diabolical revenge against Peck and his squeaky‑clean wife (Bergen) and daughter (Martin), carefully harassing the family with lurking menace that doesn't actually break the law but making it perfectly clear that he intends to rape either or both of the women into catatonia.

People disturbed by Robert De Niro's mania in the remake might be even more creeped out by Mitchum’s bare-chested presence as he explains the precise legal definition of ‘consent’ to Bergen, cracking an egg in his hand and rubbing it into her chest.  The climax, set in a conveniently-named river, is an especially exciting mano-a-mano pay-off to all the ratcheted-up tension, but it’s Mitchum's sly craziness which raises it to cult heights.

Bernard Herrmann's pounding score (reused in the remake) and sterling support is provided by a post-Psycho Martin Balsam (like Herrmann, one of several Hitch hold-overs on the cast and crew) and a pre-bald Telly Savalas.

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Movies | 02 09 2016

Cape Fear (1962)

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‘Cape Fear’ (1991) Movie Review: One of the Greatest Thrillers of the 90’s

Cape Fear is a great movie starring Robert De Niro , Nick Nolte , Jessica Lange , Juliette Lewis and Joe Don Baker . Directed by Martin Scorsese .

About the Movie

Cape Fear is, first of all, a magnificent film. Great performances (of course, De Niro stands out playing a total psychopath). The plot: an ex-convict comes to embitter the life of a lawyer for not doing his job well many years later. But during his 14 years inside, the guy has had a hard time (he was a rapist, no less), so he learned to read and imbibed Nietzsche and other concepts and… he digested them as he digested them (although they said the same thing about the Nazis, the philosopher is to blame).

The film is a metaphor and a religious tale, with dreamlike images (the changing sky) and an irreal setting. What I mean is, sometimes the director (Scorsese, no less) tricks us with the editing (as always, Thelma Schoonmaker was behind it) and the thing is not Dogma-like (we appreciate it, hee hee). I mean that the tricks are noticeable but Scorsese makes them patently apparent and that we are watching a movie. Literary theme: Thomas Wolfe is very present as is his angel that looked at us one day. Now that angel is a psychopath who comes to torment us and wreak vengeance in our lives (a bit different from Wolfe’s book, hence the metaphor).

A very intelligent film, different, that plays with the viewer and with classic suspense… nor does it take anyone’s side, because the traditional family it defends… is also in a way broken from the inside due to the husband’s infidelities…, by her passivity…, by a girl who is a teenager.

The angel has arrived and we will see what she shows us.

Recommended, even if some years have passed.

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