Cape Fear (1991)

Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Cape Fear adds complexity while retaining the essential storyline and even movie score by Bernard Hermann from the 1962 film.  In the original, Max Cady’s motive seemed to be revenge.  He was angry that Bowden’s testimony as a witness to his crime placed him in jail.  The circumstances are different in Scorsese’s version.  We learn that Bowden was Cady’s attorney in a trial for assault, and that Bowden suppressed evidence showing the victim’s history of promiscuous behavior.  Cady’s discovery of the suppressed evidence motivates his quest for revenge.  It also becomes the original sin at the heart of Bowden’s character.

Another difference is Bowden’s marriage.  In Scorsese’s version it is deeply troubled.  Bowden (Nick Nolte) has moved his family to New Essex, NC, from Atlanta to make a new start after infidelity led to a crisis in his marriage.  In New Essex, he and his wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) struggle to hold things together.  Leigh worries that he is having another affair.  The atmosphere is tense.  Leigh is trying to pursue a career as a designer.  She alludes to “lost years” in her life, and she’s probably referring to years she has lost to the marriage.  The daughter Danielle is a fifteen-year-old recently suspended from school for smoking marijuana. She feels the tension in her parents’ marriage, hears their arguments, and is unhappy.  Cady exploits all of these weaknesses.  Perhaps the most uncomfortable scene in the film comes when he lures Danielle into the basement of her high school, pretending to be her drama teacher.  This is essentially a seduction scene, where Cady convinces her of his sincerity by referring to private details of her life and her parents’ marriage.  He convinces her that they share much in common and asks if he can put his arm around her.  Even though she recognizes him as the man who has been stalking her family, she allows him.  He makes her suspicious of her parents and what they’ve told her. 

In the 1962 film, Cady reads legal books in prison.  We know little about his background other than the fact than he grew up in difficult lower economic class circumstances.  In Scorsese’s version, Cady goes to jail for 14 years rather than 8 and although he is illiterate when convicted he learns to read in prison and reads widely.  In addition to law, we know he’s read philosophy, including Nietzsche, and he’s a fan of Henry Miller.  He’s read Look Homeward, Angel (a novel whose attitude towards the past provides a faint undertone in the film) and talks with Danielle about it.  Cady’s an intelligent, self-educated psychopath, enamored of the culture whose art and literature and music he’s come to love, enraged that he can’t participate in the affluence of people like Bowden.  Like his predecessor in the 1962 film, he’s jealous of Bowden’s economic status.  He knows that, were it not for his jail time and the economic facts of his birth and upbringing, not to mention luck, he could live the life that Bowden lives.  This enrages him.

Scorsese’s film is more psychological in focus than the original, although in both films Cady understands how to inflict terror.  De Niro’s Cady is more aggressive, more violent, and more ingenious than Mitchum’s. 

De Niro is great as Cady, but you know it’s a role, a part he’s playing.  He never melds with it.  The same can be said for the other characters, with the exception of Danielle, who’s convincing as the vulnerable and psychologically damaged adolescent.  The Bowden family dynamics seem false, and the actors don’t convincingly inhabit their roles.  When the terror begins, the family behaves as if being stalked and threatened is normal.  They walk along the sidewalks of the town, talking to one another about their plans to resist Cady.  They suspect Cady has already entered their house, that he’s poisoned their dog.  In general he’s created a menacing atmosphere. Paranoia and anxiety ought to have set in much earlier than it does.

The 1962 film has simplicity.  It does not weigh us down with complicated information about Bowden’s marriage and past.  It does not draw out elaborately the character of Cady and instead works in reductive, simplistic fashion to conjure a narrative of revenge and fear.  Although, in a sense, the 1991 film gives us more to think and talk about, in particular with respect to Cady’s character, the 1962 film is a more seamless, more effective story.

While the South was a background in the original, Scorsese foregrounds it.  We see images of the Confederate flag, and Cady’s past is clearly one of fundamentalism and biblical literalism.  He’s covered with tattoos that use the Biblical language of sin and redemption.  Cady reminds me of the main character in Flannery O’Connor’s story “Parker’s Back.” His frequent Biblical references suggest O’Connor’s character the Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”  The South is a center of fundamentalism.  Scorsese uses associations with the South of violence, religious mania, and the subjugation of women as a way of building Cady’s character as well as Bowden’s.

Fear of rape is an issue in the 1991 film, but it is not its heart.  We know Cady plans to have sex with Bowden’s wife and daughter, consensual sex if he can convince them, but the central horror in the film is not the prospect of rape but rather the total destruction that he wants to inflict.

De Niro’s Cady is a psychopath.  Bowden as played by Nolte comes close to becoming a psychopath himself.  Cady several times tells Bowden how much they’re alike, how they’re equals. One of his goals is to reduce Bowden to his level.  He succeeds.

 

Cape Fear (1962)

Fear of rape is the central terror in Cape Fear (1962; dir. J. Lee Thompson).  In jail for eight years because of the testimony of lawyer Sam Bowden, Max Cady seeks revenge through stalking, threats, and sexual violence against the lawyer’s family.  Cady has no other motives, perhaps other than class resentment.  (Of course, a psychopath doesn’t need motives).  Bowden and family live in a stylish upper-class home.  While he was in prison Cady’s wife divorced him and left with their daughter.  He blames Bowden for all that has happened to him.  He covets what Bowden possesses—happiness, a family, a beautiful wife and daughter.  But he doesn’t want just to possess these things.  He wants to destroy them, through what the film increasingly makes clear will be sexual violence, mainly against Bowden’s daughter.

In 1962, the concept of sexual violence against children, in this case a girl who appears to be twelve to fourteen years in age, would have been far more terrifying than it is today because at least today, when such violence is horrific enough,  it is at least talked about.  I can’t think of another film from this era that raises this fear as directly as this one.  When Cady confronts the mother and her daughter late in the film, you feel their fear.  In that regard the film hasn’t aged at all.

Given the historical context of the South and 1962, one can ponder the film’s underlying motives.  No one questions that sexual violence—rape—is horrible.  But was fear of rape in 1962 foremost in the Southern mind, even the national mind?  Why would Southern white people fear the violence of a lower class white male against an upper class white male and his wife and child?  Such violence is terrible enough that it can become the center of a suspenseful film.  But why highlight it at this time?

A primary argument in the South against racial integration during the 1950s and 1960s was that it would bring the races together and make it easier for black men to harass, molest, and rape white women.  The assumption (for those who thought in such paranoid racist terms) was that all black males wanted to do such things.  What if a black man took Max Cady’s place?  How much would the film change? There would be certain things a black Max Cady could not do in 1962 in the South.  He could not come and go as easily as the white Max Cady.  He probably would experience more interference from the police.  Fear of rape was already exaggerated in the public mind.  Does this film seize that fear and redirect it to Max Cady, a lower class white man?  Is this film an expression of the fear of racial violence against white women by black men, all the result of integration?  I must admit to doubting my own argument.  If the film were simply a text, the product of a single writer, especially a Southern writer, it might make more sense to me.  But the film is a product of many makers.  It’s based on a novel by John D. McDonald novel, who was from Pennsylvania.  The director J. Lee Thompson was from England.  The screenwriter James R. Webb was from Colorado.  So my speculation begins to fall apart.

Why isn’t Bowden given more protection against Cady?  It’s difficult to believe that Cady could threaten a family in the way he threatens this one and get away with it.  We’re told that he had read enough law in prison to understand how far he can carry his threats without breaking the law, and he’s careful not to go too far.  But is he really that smart?  Is there no legal recourse for the Bowdens?  It’s equally difficult to believe that the police and a private detective would conspire with lawyer Bowden to plot Cady’s murder.  Bowden completely compromises what one would assume (hope?) are his personal ethics: he first offers to pay Cady off if he will leave.  What has he done to pay Cady off for—what crime, what lapse?  This offer at the least raises questions about Bowden’s character.  He further compromises himself when he hires three men to beat Cady up.  When he schemes with a private detective to kill Cady, he seems completely lost. 

In the end, Bowden and Cady fight one another in the North Carolina swamps.  Bowden’s final decision not to shoot Cady, but instead to see him imprisoned for life, is supposed to indicate that he has, after all, retained civilized values, but this weakly redemptive moment seems unconvincing.

Although Cady rapes either Bowden’s wife or daughter, he certainly terrorizes them and one can imagine the psychological scars he leaves.  Yet the person most damaged at the end of this film is Bowden.  Are the measures he takes to protect his family justified?  Straw Dogs (1971; dir. Sam Peckinpah), in which a mousy graduate student resorts to savage methods to protect his wife, seems an analog. 

Bernard Hermann’s score is a major contributing factor to the suspense and fear in the film.

 

 

 

Dallas Buyers Club

Matthew McConnaughey is undoubtedly the center of Dallas Buyer’s Club (2013; dir. Jean-Marc Vallée).  I’m not surprised the film earned him the Best Actor Oscar, but I would not have been surprised if other recent films had done the same for him.  His role in HBO’s True Detective this past season was one of the best character portrayals I’ve seen on television, or in film for that matter.  Dallas Buyer’s Club is basically a character study, and once it establishes itself as a film about a hard-living lower class cowboy who discovers he has AIDs (he’s told he has 30 days to live), the film proceeds to detail how his struggle to deal with adversity makes him a better man.  There’s certainly nothing wrong with that often worked theme, and it makes for an entertaining film.  The film reminds us of what the early years of the AIDS epidemic were like—when few people understood the disease, how it was transmitted, who was most likely to get it, how it might be treated.  At first McConnaughey’s character Ron Woodruff refuses to see that he has anything in common with more conventional AIDS victims—gay men—he’s probably acquired the disease through using dirty needles--and he’s interested only in finding drugs that will cure him of the disease.  As he discovers outlets in Mexico and elsewhere that sell drugs not yet approved by the FDA, he sets up a buyer’s club that allows him, through a legal loophole, to sell those drugs to AIDS victims.  At first his motive is to make money.  Gradually his motives and sympathies shift, and he becomes a crusader for AIDS victims.  The film makes a strong and disturbing argument against how slowly things moved in the 1980s as scientists used well established painstaking methods to develop and test drugs for treating the disease.  The FDA’s conservatism, defensible in many situations, in the case of the fast spreading AIDS epidemic meant that many people died before drugs for treating it that were already available in other countries were approved.  The film isn’t insensitive to the fact that use of unproven drugs could be dangerous.  Woodruff’s developing friendship with the transsexual Rayon (Jared Leto) and with Doctor Eve (Jennifer Garner) are at the film’s heart.