Want to discuss the original "Cape Fear", from 1962?

I happened on the last half of this film on TV several months ago. I’m 60, and I had never before heard of this movie! ...And I have seen some pretty creepy movies on TV in the 60s and 70s! My son afterwards explained to me about the episode from The Simpsons, with which I was familiar, which was a spoof of the remake of CF with De Niro, a film I also had been unaware of in its day.

I saw right away that the sensitivity of the focus of the story was the likely reason why the TV stations where I’m from had shunned airing Cape Fear in the old days. I was shocked by the violence or type of violence in those final scenes I happened upon, but I also felt that there was something deeper, perhaps brooding about that film.

Then the next thing I knew, my wife, who sees everything, found me the DVD version which includes the making-of.

What an amazing masterwork I almost went through life without seeing! And what an astonishing actor Robert Mitchum as Max Cadie is! At once a truly fearful force of nature, an informed, self-educated manipulator, a monster (see that low-lit lateral shot of him, from ground level, when he first creeps into the water at night, literally reptile-like... Brrr!), and in a way a seducer with his somewhat sad, child stare. He is an ambivalent, multidimensional character, who elevates an already brilliant hitchcockian screenplay and direction – strongly built on delusions.

I also loved that making-of featuring fascinating interviews with Gregory Peck and director J. Lee Thompson.

What do you think of it?

 

I first saw the remake of CAPE FEAR with Robert De Niro and liked it a lot. When the DVD was released, I seem to recall a special deal on both versions, so that's when I first saw the original. A couple of neat things about the remake is that both Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck have roles in it, and it completely reused the original score by Bernard Herrmann.

 

Wow. And I thought I lived in a cave.

I think it's a very good film with a great performance by Mitchum.

I hate the remake.

 

Aptly titled. I was cloaked in suspenseful fear. Glad I saw other Mitchum characters before seeing CF.

 

The Mitchum performance is easily my favorite of the two. And DeNiro is no slouch.

 

WAY better than the campy Scorsese film! The 1962 one still holds up really well:

Cape Fear (1962)

 

First saw the original in a film class in college back in the late '70s and it really creeped me out. What an amazing piece of fairly low budget filmmaking. Highly recommended.

 

Do you happen to remember how your teacher "sized" this film? I had a teacher in junior college, in a class of film theory, whom I sure wished, in hindsight, had analyzed this particular one for us...

 

Curiously I'd barely heard of it before catching it on TV (TNT or TBS IIRC) in the late '80s. Despite my being a Mitchum fan it had gone completely under my radar. I don't think I'd ever seen it playing on TV before, and as I recall Halliwell panned it in his film guide.

I'd hardly call it low budget. Peck and Mitchum were major names, and Peck was just coming off the megahit Navarone. It was an important studio release.

 

I can't remember how deeply we dove into the movie in terms of structure or message. This class was near the end of my senior year and I was filling out electives. We read the assigned books then watched the movie in class in a "compare and contrast" session. I have to admit it was the most fun class I ever took as it gave me a chance to see movies that I might not have seen otherwise. We also did "The Big Sleep" and "Maltese Falcon" plus some others that I can't remember given the 40 years that have passed. But, "Cape Fear" really stuck with me.

 

Thanks for starting this thread. Reminds me that it's been too long since I watched the DVD. Mitchum and Peck are two of my favorite actors (I just re-watched Peck's I Walk the Line, co-starring the gorgeous Tuesday Weld). I prefer Mitchum in less-intense stuff like Out of the Past and The Big Steal, but that may have more to do with Jane Greer being in both those movies.

 

Mitchum oozes real menace in CAPE FEAR. De Niro is a great actor but pales in comparison to Mitchum.

 

Think this was the film that inspired Lou Reed's New Age.

 

You're welcome!

 

I love the film, but wish Peck was not so much of a straight arrow. The remake makes that character more conflicted, which I like. Nothing beats Mitchum, though - so creepy and powerful. He just has to sit there and you can’t look away. Not too many actors that strike me like that nowadays.

 

Except there's no fat blonde actress in it

I always associate the song wNight Of The Hunter

 

Shelley Winters.

 

Like the fourth wall bit where he stares into the camera ( staircase ).

 

I like the remake okay, you just have to take it on it's own terms - it's lurid and campy and totally over the top - if that's what you're in the mood for it's fine.

As far as DeNiro vs Mitchum . . . It's really hard to say exactly how he manages it, but Mitchum is somehow even more slimy than DeNiro. Mitchum's Max Cady sometimes seems sort of bemused by his own degeneracy, which is really even creepier than all the showy Deniro antics. Mitchum also has a talent for dominating pretty much every scene he's in, even if he's hardly doing anything - that goes for anything he's in, not just Cape Fear. I also found DeNiro's attempt at a southern accent pretty atrocious. I'm not sure what in the world was up with his wardrobe.

 

He does!

But I have this perspective from watching the film for the first time, that one don't actually see Cady do anything wrong or menacing until the man he hounds (actually harasses only, up to the point where he gets mugged) finally plans, with the complicity of his wife, to kill him?

The rape which is the backstory, the poisoning of the dog, the assault on the easy woman... Even when Cady apparently checks out Bowden’s daughter from above, when she is painting the boat, we cannot see from his facial expression, from any movement of his pupils for instance, that he is actually lusting after her. All we have, upon reverse angle, is a point of view, in fact our point of view... Whereupon he is confronted by Bowden and perhaps then acts verbally, only, as if he was lustful after the young girl to put pressure on his victim...

So it seems all "hearsay"... From all we are shown on the screen, Cady seems actually more interested in older women. Or, if not that much older, at least who have been around... When he finally gets his hands on the Bowdens’ daughter, he takes her away, and we have no idea what he intends to do with her. Of course by then the situation is highly tensed, a murder has been indeed committed by Cady before our eyes, etc.

That’s the ambivalence of the dynamics I see between the good guy and the bad guy in this movie. The moment were Bowden confides to his wife his intention to lure Cady into a trap and kill him, that tensed moment where his wife hesitates, but we can see in her eyes that she is about to decide to go along, is one of the most chilling scenes I have ever seen. Chilling because we witness the good guy – and on top of it with the abetment of his wife! – turning into a cold-blooded killer, even if this is for anticipated self-defense. I don't think I have never seen that before in non-Western genre, Hollywood movies...

 

I agree the original '62 version was the best, it made a big impact on me as a kid. I remember Lori Martin (1947 - 2010) was in it, which added to the creepy drama as I already had a bit of a crush on her from National Velvet on TV.

 

Martin Balsam too (as the Judge).

 

Robert Mitchum was a beast in that film, probably his best role, along with The Night of the Hunter.

 

Based on this book. I have the original paperback somewhere.

 

love the original....the remake is barely better than the Psycho remake