14

CAPE FEAR (1991)

FILM DETAILS

RELEASE DATE: November 13, 1991

WRITTEN BY: Wesley Strick

STARRING: Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis

RUNNING TIME: 128 minutes

ABOUT THE FILM

One thing Martin Scorsese has never been is a populist film director. He’s had his popular successes, to be sure, but much of his catalog is made up of work that only just made back its money (if at all); personal, often-experimental films that tend to be at odds with Hollywood trends. For every The Wolf of Wall Street, which made $392 million worldwide on a $100 million budget, there is a Bringing Out the Dead, which couldn’t even earn $17 million to match its $55 million budget. The struggle to secure funding for his pictures and the precarious balance between commerce and art—art with a lowercase A, as Mr. Scorsese is averse to labeling his work as “Art”—has been a hallmark of his career.

That makes Cape Fear something of an anomaly, though an intentional one. Much like The Color of Money, this was an attempt by the director to show that he could make pictures that could also succeed at the box office. Originally attached to Steven Spielberg, the populist director of the era, as well as partially produced by him (albeit without credit), Cape Fear is a mainstream thriller and a remake of the 1962 film of the same name.¹ Scorsese’s version leans heavily on talent—Nick Nolte during one of the most fruitful periods of his career, Jessica Lange coming off her fifth Academy Award nomination, and Robert De Niro in his third Oscar-nominated role for Scorsese, not to mention Juliette Lewis with a remarkable, career-making performance—and also aims to infuse the thriller genre with the topic Scorsese knows best: human turmoil.

In Cape Fear, Max Cady (De Niro) is released from prison after serving fourteen years for raping a sixteen-year-old girl. His fixation through all those long years has been his defense attorney, Sam Bowden (Nolte), who, horrified at his client’s crime, buried evidence that may have lightened Cady’s sentence. Once released, Cady begins a campaign of harassment against Bowden; his wife, Leigh (Lange); and his daughter, Danielle (Lewis), and it’s a clever one that makes Sam look like the bad guy. “The law considers me more of a loose cannon than Max Cady,” he complains. As things escalate, Cady begins to manipulate Danielle and drive wedges between her and her parents. After he kills two people in their home, the Bowdens flee to a beloved vacation spot, Cape Fear. Cady follows, and they barely escape a final confrontation with him with their lives. Standard thriller stuff, at least on the surface.

The original script was far more traditional than it became. It was written with Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment in mind, after all, ending up with Scorsese only after Spielberg decided it wasn’t right for him. The pair traded film rights, Schindler’s List for Cape Fear, and Scorsese got the picture. (The idea of what a Scorsese-directed Schindler’s List would have looked like is tantalizing, though Spielberg was clearly the right man for the job.)

But screenwriter Wesley Strick said the director was quick to take a figurative knife to the screenplay’s most conventional traits. “Marty had quite a radar for every bit of slickness and hyperbole,” Strick said. “Anything that smacked of television, all the dialogue he perceived as being ‘clever,’ everything that was too well-reasoned, too neat, too clean, with ideas that were somewhat predigested—he wanted it gone.”² This wasn’t going to be a standard thriller. It was going to be a Martin Scorsese picture.

ANALYSIS

Cape Fear is a film about the erosion of family, disguised as a traditional thriller. On the surface, the central conflict appears to be the Bowden family versus Cady, a fairly straightforward tale of people being tormented by a madman. Beneath the surface, however, the film is more concerned with turmoil within the family and the unseen wounds that threaten to tear it apart from the inside. “I had read Cape Fear three times. And three times I hated it,” Scorsese said. “I thought the family was too clichéd, too happy.… They were like Martians to me. I was rooting for Cady to get them.”³ Once injected with marital turmoil, professional malfeasance, and an uneasy exploration of a teen’s awakening sexuality, however, the picture becomes much more than a conventional thriller.

Opening with Danielle and bookending the film with close-ups on her face suggests that, though most of the focus is on Sam Bowden and Max Cady, the real journey here is hers. It is she who is transformed. The key murder of this thriller is not of a person; it’s of her innocence. In the opening narration, she reminisces about family times at the coastal region of North Carolina called Cape Fear, “when the only thing to fear on those enchanting summer nights was that the magic would end and real life would come crashing in.” And in fact, that is what happens. Real life destroys that special place, her father’s past sins made flesh in the form of a tattooed, sexually charged madman.

The next cut is to Cady’s jail cell, the walls covered in dictators and comic-book characters. He is the real life she fears—real life twisted into a horrid form but real life all the same. His body is covered in tattoos: Bible quotes and slogans about justice, about righteousness, about vengeance smiting the false. A storm boils in the sky behind him as he struts away from prison, now released to the world. He is a horror.

Back at the Bowdens’, Leigh Bowden is designing a logo for a client when we first see her. She explains what she is looking to get across: “Stability. A company you can trust.” An appropriate theme, given the lack of stability in her own family. It appears normal and stable at first, but Cady will exploit the cracks in that stability and upend their trust in one another. It’s a brilliant, subtle bit of foreshadowing. This is what Scorsese is most concerned with. De Niro’s Max Cady is a suitably frightening monster, and his escalating war with Sam is tightly plotted and gripping throughout, but it’s the drama of flawed people making a mess of their own lives that makes this a Scorsese picture.

In this case, the protagonist is at least trying not to screw up his own life. Sam is far from perfect—no Scorsese protagonist is—but he appears to be trying to move on from his past transgressions. He had a past of infidelity, and that infidelity remains a bruise on his marriage. It almost broke Leigh’s spirit. They picked up the pieces and moved on, but the hurt and mistrust lingers. Sam plays racquetball with a clerk at his law office, Lori Davis (Illeana Douglas), and though they’re both attractive and seem to enjoy one another’s company, he gently turns aside her suggestion that there is something between them. Still, he doesn’t even tell his wife that Lori exists. Lori is surprised by this. Sam explains that he’s married and that’s why he can’t tell his wife, but this is no answer. “Is marriage synonymous with deception?” she asks, and though she intends the question to be a light one, just a joke, it rings deeper for Sam. He’s been down this road before. He has cheated before. He’s trying to avoid temptation, trying to stay faithful, but Lori’s question digs at a more difficult truth for him because it’s his own deception that is going to put his family in danger: not the deception of having an affair—there is no suggestion that he plans to pursue Lori (though he is quick to invite her to play another game)—but deceptions from years prior. This idea of past sins returning, of past misdeeds lying in wait before their consequences finally arrive is a central one to the picture, and it’s one Cady exploits.

Robert De Niro’s transformation for Cape Fear, a mainstream thriller by the mainstream-averse Scorsese, earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Universal Pictures/Photofest

It’s fitting that Cady is covered in biblical passages. The ideas of sin and redemption and guilt and holy justice are familiar in the director’s work, and it’s a prevalent theme here, too. Cady is anything but a good man, yet Sam Bowden’s actions fourteen years prior are also questionable. He was tasked by law to defend his client to the best of his ability, but he knowingly suppressed information that could have aided him. Whether he was justified in that gets into murky moral territory. The truth is, it’s likely that Bowden’s deception saved any number of young women from torment at Cady’s hands. At the same time, Bowden is neither judge nor jury. In a world governed by laws, it was not his place to decide Cady’s fate. Just as Bowden must atone for his past marital sins, he must atone for his professional sins, as well. The difference is that there is no clear path to redemption for him. How could he possibly redeem himself? And more difficult still, does he truly need to?

In Max Cady’s eyes, he does. Cady seeks to corrupt the family, to immerse them in the same sin he himself was immersed in. He does this by baiting Sam into acting against his own interests, but far more insidious is the way in which he twists the family from within. He does not succeed in killing the family (though he does kill two other victims). He does not rape members of the family, as he plans (though Lori is brutally raped and disfigured at his hands). He doesn’t even seriously injure any of the Bowdens (though he does kill their dog). But what he does succeed in doing to the family is to twist the Bowdens’ daughter away from them and perhaps turn her onto a darker path. He does so by exploiting her newly blossoming sexuality, and in Cape Fear, sexuality is the opposite of purity and goodness. There is no healthy sexuality here, no true intimacy. Sex is infidelity; it’s the loss of innocence; it’s violent rape. There is an echo all the way back to Who’s That Knocking at My Door? here, a film in which the lead (J. R.) was put off by the discovery that his girlfriend had been raped—not because she had been violated in such an intimate way but because it meant she wasn’t a virgin. Here the director’s Catholicism finds its way into the work, subtly suggesting that sex is sin and corruption. “Punishment for everything you ever felt sexually,” he said. “It is the basic moral battleground of Christian ethics.”⁴

We see early on that Danielle is ripe for this sort of corruption, too. After Cady starts stalking the family, Leigh tells Danielle to watch out for him; he might be a stalker or flasher. (She does not yet know the depths of his crimes when she says this.) “You think I’ve never been flashed before?” Danielle asks. It’s evident she hasn’t. She’s sexually naïve, saying this simply to wind her mother up, but she’s curious. This curiosity is what Cady will exploit. Later, when attempting to emotionally manipulate Leigh at the end of the Bowden driveway, Cady spots Danielle in the yard. At the sight of her, he races away, as if understanding that he couldn’t be in her presence, not yet. There is too much temptation there for him. But it shows him the way he can cause the family the deepest possible hurt.

Cady tricks Danielle into meeting him in her school theater. The result is the film’s most memorable scene and the performance that won Lewis an Oscar nomination. It’s a difficult scene to watch. De Niro was around forty-seven when it was filmed, Lewis was seventeen, and this chasm-wide age gap is only a small part of what makes it so disturbing. Danielle’s girlish awkwardness veers back and forth between naïve innocence and adolescent curiosity. Max Cady, on the other hand, is all greasy sexuality and exploitative manipulation. He knows how to push her buttons. She’s a teenager in a tension-filled home, rebelling against her parents and desperate to feel like a grown woman. He exploits that. “Your parents don’t want you to achieve adulthood. That’s natural. They know the pitfalls of adulthood, all that freedom. They know it only too well,” he tells her. They discuss Tropic of Cancer, the sexually explicit book by Henry Miller that was once banned in the United States. It’s a provocative work, made all the more provocative by being something she’s “not supposed” to be reading.

If the scene were merely this weathered-looking, obsessive older man pushing a young girl to discuss her sexuality with him, it would be disturbing enough, but then he caresses her face and inserts his thumb in her mouth. She sucks the thumb, an off-putting blend of childlike innocence and burgeoning sexual discovery, highly suggestive, and then he kisses her, long and deeply. When he walks off, she’s overcome with a swirl of conflicting emotions, expressed without words: fear, confusion, arousal. There is a sense of danger and a sense of discovery here that both delights and frightens her. She runs from the theater in tears, unable to fully grasp what she is feeling.

This scene is especially remarkable because it was partially improvised by De Niro and the much-younger Lewis. The director set up two cameras so the pair could just work out the scene, and he rolled. They did just three takes. The first take is what you see on-screen. When De Niro puts his thumb in Lewis’s mouth, she did not know it was coming. She stayed in character, reacting as she thought Danielle would. The mix of emotions Danielle feels, the desire to please coupled with the feeling of having been violated, is a complex cocktail. And despite her questioning eyes looking up at Cady as if seeking approval, it was indeed a violation. “He put his thumb in my mouth all the way, and then he pulled it all the way out,” Lewis recalled. “I’ll tell you exactly what it felt like, emotionally—like someone walked up, penetrated you and then walked away.”⁵

Cady’s advances may have terrified most young women, but he chose his target well in Danielle. Her tumultuous home life leaves her vulnerable. Later, at home, Sam tries to impress upon her the danger Cady poses to the family. While doing so, he scolds her: “Put some clothes on. You’re not a little kid anymore.” Again, sexuality as sin. Urging her away from Cady does not have the intended result. You tell a rebellious young adult what they can’t do, and it only strengthens their resolve to do it. She grows defensive. “He didn’t force himself on me. I know you think that he did, but I think he was just trying to make a connection with me,” she tells her father.

Sam asks if Cady touched her. She smiles but doesn’t answer. He asks again. No answer. Sam grows angry, grabs her face, fiercely scolds her. His fatherly concern is understandable—Cady went to prison for raping a girl Danielle’s age—but his reaction hurts far more than it helps, exacerbated by the wedge Cady had already driven between them. There is already poison in the well. All of this makes Danielle’s sexuality the real battleground, the arena in which Cady knows he can hurt Sam the most. Sex is sin, and by awakening Danielle’s latent curiosity, he’s led her down the path.

Her parents fight over Sam’s sexual transgressions, too. When Leigh overhears him on the phone with Lori, she believes he’s cheating again. Leigh calls them “stupid, sophomoric infidelities.” Danielle hears the fighting and calls a friend to escape. “I’m just losing my mind here,” she says. As the couple argues, each dredges up the past and uses it as a weapon against the other. They bludgeon one another with it. Past pains, past hurts, the past pulled back into the here and now in order to hurt again. It’s what drives Cady. The past he believes he lost drives him, and so the idea of past hurts is something he weaponizes and injects into the Bowden marriage.

When the family finally retreats from Cady’s escalating war with them, they retreat to the past, too, to Cape Fear, where they vacationed in better times. It’s here, in a geographical embodiment of years gone by, where the situation finally reaches a head. Scorsese is known for his dynamic, visceral approach to violence, but violence is not the same as action, and to this point he hadn’t done much that looked like mainstream action. The action of Raging Bull was poetry; of Taxi Driver, dark fantasy; of GoodFellas, street-corner storytelling. But here in Cape Fear, it’s a straightforward thriller ending. We have a raging river, a family trapped in a small place, and a madman after them. Cady continues to push Danielle’s buttons, but in the end, she chooses family over temptation. Cady is killed. The end.

But the last shot of Danielle is an unspoken message to the audience. Cady awakened something in her, shook her from her childish daydreams, broke her away from her family. In the end, Max Cady won.

CONCLUSION AND IMPACT

Cape Fear was a huge box-office hit, among the most successful of the director’s career, raking in $182 million worldwide on a $35 million budget. It was also a success with critics, earning two Academy Award nominations (for De Niro and Lewis) and positive acclaim among reviewers.

The movie was quite a different beast from the Hitchcockian original, which stars Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck, both of whom have small roles in the remake, though it does pay homage to the original by using a version of the original score by Bernard Hermann, reworked here by Elmer Bernstein. In the 1962 version, Max holds a grudge against Sam because Sam testified against him, and his confrontation with the Bowden daughter is a fairly standard suspense-and-chase sequence, among other more subtle alterations in tone and approach. The changes made this Cape Fear less traditional and more modern, lending it an intellectual and emotional depth not present in the original. Perhaps more importantly, it made the movie far more Scorsese than would be expected of a mainstream thriller.

But Martin Scorsese’s career is filled with the unexpected. His next picture, for instance: a lush, colorful, talk-heavy, costume drama about unrequited love set in 1870s New York City.