“I’m goin’ give your wife and kid somethin’ they aint’ never gon’ forget, they ain’t never gon’ forget it counselor.” This is the line that has stuck with me the most from the film “Cape Fear”(1962). This movie is about an ex-convict, Max Cady, (Robert Mitchum) who comes back to town after being in prison for eight years. He went to jail for attacking a girl in a parking lot. The man who got him arrested was a lawyer who was also a witness to the crime, Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck) . Bowden was working late on a case that evening, and walking home, he heard some whimpers in the parking lot, so he ran over and found Max Cady attacking the girl. He fought with Cady while the girl screamed. He was tried in court, and Bowden testified against him, playing the part of a witness not an attorney.
Now, he’s back in town and he’s out to get the lawyer’s family. Bowden has a wife, a young daughter, and a dog. This movie is definitely disturbing and quite terrifying, but the cinematography is excellent and the shadowing is superb. (So is the directing, by J. Lee Thompson.
Robert Mitchum is terrifying and haunting in this movie. There is a remake of this film directed by Martin Scorsese. This later film also features Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, but this time with Peck as Cady’s lawyer, and Mitchum as a police man working with Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte). Juliette Lewis gives a haunting performance.
The second film changes the plot alot. The daughter is obviously older (almost sixteen), and she is more sexually desirous. The music, is by Elmer Bernstein (Leonard Bernstein’s father. The music, in my opinion suits the first film much better. Here it sounds taken. So, even though Scorses’s movie is a more modern and explicitly violent film than the original, I actually find Mitchum much more terrifying that De Niro in the lead role of Max Cady and in “Night Of The Hunter.” Except for at the end. During the desperate last scene during the storm on the boat, Robert De Niro is truly relentless, and therefore truly terrifying. He says all this on a breaking boat during a storm with his head severely burned!
I think the best performances in this movie are those of Robert De Niro and Juliette Lewis. The new version has some very disturbed and twisted scenes, a few of which I had to skip over. The truly sick and horribly violent scenes in the newer film makes me kind of hate it. We see Robert De Niro hurt (very badly) the people in this town. The movie is more violently intense (people being set on fire, cannibalism, beating up with chains and wood, rape, and strong battery.) Cape Fear (1962) has a scene with Robert Mitchum beats up a girl, but we don’t see her get beat up and we only see bruises after. In the second movie, he brutally beats a girl and severely injures her resulting in her being put in the hospital. The only time when I felt that De Niro had any psychological value was at the end when I think he gives a great performance stating the fact that Sam buried the part of the report that says that the girl he brutally raped was being promiscuous.
In the version with Robert Mitchum, Cady calls Sam Bowden’s innocent, 14-year old daughter “juicy,” but in the De Niro version, the girl is almost 16 and their relationship gets much more explicit: the girl is amost sixteen and a little sexually interested in Cady not knowing what a monster he is. Cady calls her up, posing as her new drama teacher. He kisses her. The girl is slightly sexually interested in Cady and the mother is a little interested, too. In the first version, not only is the girl 1 but she is childish and unassuming. In the first film, the daughter is psychologically almost a small child, even though she is supposedly Fourteen and obviously developed; she has a baby face and she is very short.
Night of the Hunter also with Robert Mitchum as a murderer stalking a family. In this case, he targets the children of a widow of a man who was arrested and hanged for a bank robbery and 2 murders. “Children are man at his strongest, they abide.” “They abide and they endure.” This is said by Lillian Gish at the end of the movie, I think it’s my favorite line. Night of the Hunter is a much better movie than “Cape Fear” first or second. Mitchum’s character comes to town as “Preacher” Harry Powell and marries Willa Harper (Shelley Winters) and makes it clear very fast that the marriage is for “caring for her children, not for begetting more!”. Mr.Powell married Willa for the 2 thousand dollars that her husband supposedly hid in the river. But the money is really in Pearl ( the four-year-old daughter)’s doll. Mr. Powell/He brainwashes Pearl into loving him and believing everything he says. (She calls him “Daddy Powell.”) But her brother John is a little older and knows better.
The movie is just great, really one of my top 10 favorite movies. Robert Mitchum and, of course, Lillian Gish give the best performances as, respectively, a preacher/killer/seeker of money and a bible-following “angel” who rescues homeless children and saves John and Pearl in the end. The movie isn’t gruesome although there are a few mildly disturbing scenes that still haunt me, but the whole movie sticks with me.
Night of the hunter: (1955) A+
Cape Fear: (1962) B+
Cape Fear: (1991) B
Lucy
No comments:
Post a Comment