Weekend at Cape Fear

This past weekend I took a look at Cape Fear in my continuing look at the films of 1991. I also viewed the original, which was made in 1962.

The original starred Robert Mitchum as the ex-con who bears a grudge against a lawyer, Gregory Peck, who sent him to jail. Though racy for its time, the film seems rather quaint today. There was a lot of hubbub among the censors, for Mitchum's character clearly is angling to rape Peck's teenage daughter. The word rape is never used, though. There is also a slimy scene when Mitchum assaults Peck's wife, Polly Bergen, by smearing egg all over her front.

What's most curious about this film is that it seems to be a statement about the law. Peck, a lawyer, knows Mitchum is planning something, but can't do anything throug the law, as Mitchum has boned up on law and is well within his rights. The cops try to arrest him for vagrancy, but he has enough money. He "attacks" a woman, but she won't testify against him. Peck is therefore encouraged to take matters into his own hands. As a civil libertarian, I wasn't quite sure what this film was trying to say. It wasn't against civil rights, as the characters bent over backwards to emphasize. But it also made it clear that the law sometimes is not enough to protect the innocent.

The remake takes the original and injects it with growth hormones. Everything is bigger and louder. This time Robert DeNiro is the ex-con, and Nick Nolte the lawyer. The theme of this film is not the law, but slippery morality. In the original, Peck and his family are squeaky clean. Not so in the remake. Peck had sent Mitchum up by being a material witness against him. Nolte was DeNiro's public defender, and betrayed him by suppressing evidence. Also, Nolte's family has layering that would be unheard of in 1962. He has been unfaithful to his wife (Jessica Lange) and his daughter, Juliette Lewis, is a bit of a delinquent, who got caught smoking pot and has to go to summer school.

So, as the film goes on, one wonders who the victim is. DeNiro is on full boil as the villainous Max Cady, but his reasons are clearer than Mitchum's are. If Mitchum was menacing, DeNiro is savage. The ending, which involves a rainstorm and a runaway houseboat, borders on the silly (how indestructible can a man be?) but unlike the original, which has Mitchum returned to the hands of the law, Nolte exacts a harsher justice.