Scorsese/De Niro: Cape Fear(Dir. Martin Scorsese, 2h46m, 1991)

For a filmography that, as we have noted to this point is largely noted for mob movies and those otherwise considering Italio-American and American masculinity, Scorsese post 1980 has a greater degree of thematic variability to his work. We have covered one such film, King of Comedy, that sits in the camp of Scorsese's "other" movies, and today we turn to another "Un-Scorsesian" picture, the storied 1991 remake of the 1962 J. Lee Thompson film, Cape Fear, in which Robert De Niro's educated psychopath haunts American suburbia to inflict vengeance upon the family of his former lawyer (Nick Nolte) and his family (Jessica Lange and Juliette Lewis).

Cape Fear's very existence as a Scorsese film is down unusual piece of horse trading. Initially, Steven Spielberg, unsure he has the maturity as a director to adapt the 1982 Thomas Keneally novel, Schindler's Ark, into a film, offers the film to Scorsese-Spielberg then returns to his long-gestating remake of Cape Fear. The original 1962 film, for its part, is a fairly competent cinematic homage to Hitchcock's suspense-thrillers-it would be given he had allegedly storyboarded the film and was to direct if not for a pay dispute-Thompson even hiring Bernard Hermann to write the score. For a director often regarded as Hitchcock's successor, the film may have seemed perfect to begin with, but Spielberg eventually arrived at a decision that was to shape his and, to an extent, Scorsese's filmography from here on out. The film was too violent for him to make.

Stealing the Show: Robert De Niro as Max Cady.

At this point, Scorsese, having mulled over the production of Schindler’s Ark, also arrived at a decision-he was the wrong man for the job. Aided by Universal, who had come to Scorsese's rescue over The Last Temptation of Christ, the two directors swap projects, and Scorsese begins work on Cape Fear. For much of the film, Scorsese hews close to the feel and tone of the 1962 film, and it is, considering Scorsese's only other remake is of the Hong Kong action movie, Infernal Affairs as The Departed (2006), made in far more familiar a Scorsesian style, admirable to the degree that he recaptures the noirish feel of both the imitator, Thompson, and the imitated, Hitchcock. One is, certainly, caught by the sense of Scorsese's consummate understanding of cinema, exhibited in his many documentaries about the medium, such that he is able to carry out, at several points in Cape Fear, this veritable disappearing act into Hitchcock's style.

This chamelonic shift into Hitchcock's style carries on in the faithful recreation of the narrative-Max Cady (De Niro) is released from prison only to begin terrorising his former defence lawyer, Sam Bowden (Nolte) and his family. With his arrival in town, so begins a campaigns of threats and escalating violence, including the slaying of their dog, Cady stalking the family's mother, and a pattern of disturbing behaviour, leading to Bowden unsuccessfully attempting to run the convicted rapist out of town, only for this to backfire and for Cady to use the evidence to attempt to disbar him, leading to a flight from the town to the Bowdens' houseboat where a final confrontation takes place.

To this, Scorsese adds narrative nuance; the Bowdens are no longer a perfect nuclear family, but far more complex, Scorsese suggesting that Sam may have had an extra-marital affair, whilst many of the scenes that take place and Cady's assault on Lori Davis (Illeana Douglas) is now motivated by her crush on Bowden. The Bowdens are a family with flaws, and at points, the awkwardness between Sam and Leigh (Lange) bristles into open tension, a sense that this intruder will tear their family apart. There is something more systemic, more calculating, about this incarnation of Cady, and this comes to the fore when considering the couple's daughter; by merely ageing up her a single year, Scorsese transforms the film's focus, and Cady's with it, into something far more unsettling, and openly predatory. Yet, this too is more nuanced, Cady's eloquence, and teenage rebellion creating moments where Cady becomes more than a monster.

Against De Niro's monstrous Cady, Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte)'s everyman feels like a man reckoning with forces outside his control

At the heart of the film. though, is De Niro. Robert De Niro has rarely played villains, more often, he is antagonists, or anti-heroes, men at the edge of great precipices. There, of course, Al Capone in The Untouchables, Neil McCauley in Heat, Louis Gara in Jackie Brown, and, most bizarrely Fearless Leader in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle but out and out villains remain rare for Scorsese's chief muse. His turn in Cape Fear, thus, is quite a revelation-and like something out of Revelations-a heavily tattooed southern hick who quotes philosophy and has biblical quotes inked across his form; as Cady snarls, when accosted by thugs sent by Bowden's investigator "'I'm better than you all! I can out-learn you. I can out-read you. I can out-think you. And I can out-philosophize you. And I'm gonna outlast you." For a career otherwise largely consisting of mannered, naturalistic performances, it is refreshing, especially compared to the films we have discussed previously, to see De Niro play a more outlandish and uninhibited figure.

De Niro also outacts everyone else on screen; from his first moments on screen, where the camera holds on the lurid and colossal tattoo of scales of judgement as he works out, to his sudden, and often unsettling appearances, most notably at a Fourth of July parade, seemingly to materialise out of nowhere. There is an uncanny physicality to De Niro, a brutishness that seems to inform his appearances, something that Scorsese, of course, previously considered in Raging Bull, but it is in his unrelenting pursuit, that almost unstoppable sense to his performance, that Scorsese and De Niro present this hellish figure. This, matched with his verbose, and often biblically cadenced speech, often launching, particularly as his revenge reaches its apotheosis, into the fire and brimstone of a preacher, bringing his retribution, and his dark desires down upon the Bowdens, means that De Niro's role as Cady is at once horrifying and riveting in what may be De Niro's most underrated performance.

Back to Cape Fear itself; thus. Whilst it may be dominated by that performance, with De Niro's fire and brimstone and threat, and whilst it may be of of the junior entries in Scorsese's film-making career, it remains a fascinating cul-de-sac in both of their careers,where Martin Scorsese reimagined another film-maker's work, and in doing so, presented a side of Robert De Niro as an actor little seen before, or indeed since.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Cape Fear is available via streaming on Apple TV, and on DVD and BluRay from Universal.

Next week, Scorsese and De Niro return to the mob, and to Vegas, as we discuss 1995's Casino.

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