Cape Fear (1991)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Sam Bowden is a small-town corporate attorney. Max Cady is a tattooed, cigar-smoking, Bible-quoting, psychotic rapist. What do they have in common? 14 years ago, Sam was a public defender assigned to Max Cady's rape trial, and he made a serious error: he hid a document from his illiterate client that could have gotten him acquitted. Now, the cagey Cady has been released, and he intends to teach Sam Bowden and his family a thing or two about loss.
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What critics compared Cape Fear to
"Think Cape Fear or Falling Down but with high octane B-movie goodness feeding its engine"…
Tom is first cousin to Max Cady of both versions of the classic crime thriller “Cape Fear.”
The obvious parallels to this are those men who’ve been pushed to the limit and have decided to see what’s on the other side – the likes of Michael Douglas in Falling Down and Robert De Niro in Cape Fear.
Although Mr. Thompson, whose other credits included "The Guns of Navarone" and "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes," moved the first "Cape Fear" along in simple, linear fashion, Mr. Scorsese did not rely heavily upon the original.
Under the workmanlike direction of J. Lee Thompson (“Cape Fear,” 1961) from the script by producer Carl Foreman, which is based on the best-seller by Alistair MacLean, it becomes your typical crowd pleasing war film that questions wartime heroics but exploits their actions as part of its draw.
Although Mr. Thompson, whose other credits included "The Guns of Navarone" and "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes," moved the first "Cape Fear" along in simple, linear fashion, Mr. Scorsese did not rely heavily upon the original.
Maybe when McNaughton inserts his first close-up of a just-sealed bullet wound, his thirtieth shot of Denise Richards' nipples, or his plagiaristic carbon-copying of the rope-in-the-water shot from Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear, a Southern-fried suspense film as rigorous and invigorating as this one is lifeless.
After that radio conversation, the movie abruptly drops its exploration of cowardice and masculinity and focuses on the action, ultimately putting it slightly below similar movies like Martin Scorsese’s 1991 “Cape Fear” or David Cronenberg’s 2005 “A History of Violence.”
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Imagine a remake of Cape Fear shot like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, with Max Cady recast as a child, and you’ll have some idea of the strangeness of Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
Imagine Sophie’s Choice about to meet The Shining, approaching from either side of Cape Fear.
“Elle” hawks back to films like “Cape Fear” from Martin Scorsese or “Wild Things” from John McNaughton – stylistically ravaging, but hypnotically inscrutable in its narrative defenses.
Like so many movie stalkers before him Gordo is relentless and clever (think of him as a nerdy version of Robert de Niro’s Max in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear from 1991 and you have a sense of the chill factor Edgerton hits.)
I want to go home,” Faith repeats again and again, as Alien whispers in her ear and caresses her cheek, like De Niro seducing Juliette Lewis in Cape Fear.
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This is a thriller, so Hitchcock is the obvious reference point (as he was in "Cape Fear").
Instead, he seems to be out to explore the conventions of the horror genre, as in Cape Fear, and to pay homage to his heroes while coming up with a few new tricks.
In tackling Shutter Island , only his second thriller since the 1991 remake of Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese, who is a master artist in the eyes of even the most jaded cynic, takes a type of story familiar to all of us and dresses its decidedly ghoulish Hitchcockian bones in something gossamer and graceful.
Martin Scorseses "Shutter Island" is the most bizarrely portentous and overemphatic Hollywood thriller Ive seen since, well, Martin Scorseses "Cape Fear."
Back in 1991, when Martin Scorsese made Cape Fear, he figured out how to direct an unabashed commercial thriller that still had the flavor of his obsessions.
“Shutter Island,” Scorsese's first attempt at terror since 1991's “Cape Fear” and Hollywood's latest adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel (“Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone”), was set for release in October but pushed back to strengthen Paramount’s 2010 schedule.
The critical hosannas for Scorsese's drastic-change-of-pace romance (it came right after his hyperbolic thriller Cape Fear) don't match up with what he puts on the screen.
The entire running time of "Silence" could be the self-flagellating fantasy of the young hoodlum hero of Scorsese's 1973 breakthrough " Mean Streets " as he holds his hand over a flame (the title character in " Taxi Driver " did the same thing), and the terrors visited upon the priests and their flock are sadistic enough to have come straight from the reptile brain of Max Cady in " Cape Fear ," a devil or demon figure who exists to punish people for the sins of weakness, hypocrisy and pride.
Whether it is one of the avowed classics like “Mean Streets,” “Raging Bull” or “Goodfellas,” an offbeat personal project such as “The Age of Innocence” or “Kundun” or even an overt commercial consideration like “The Color of Money,” “Cape Fear” or “Shutter Island” that he occasionally finds himself working on, he approaches each one with such passion and energy, both in matters of cinema technique and in working with actors, that they still manage to feel fresh and vital no matter how many times one watches them.
So many of Martin Scorsese’s films have explored religious themes, e.g., “Who’s That Knocking at My Door?” (1967), with its final scene in a Catholic church, to “Mean Streets” (1973) to of course “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988), and even “Cape Fear” (1991), with Robert De Niro’s psychopath Max Cady covered in tattoos of Biblical passages about vengeance.
Heck, I'm even a huge fan of Scorsese's previous remake, the Grand Guignolesque "Cape Fear".
Naturally, it takes some time to get used to the rampant Bahston accents, but forgoing the violent excesses of "Cape Fear" and the bloated dalliances of "Casino", "The Departed" is Mr. Scorsese at his most stripped-down best.
Rather this is more like a “Casino” or “Cape Fear” – slickly made popular entertainment that turns a familiar formula on its head to make it thoroughly engaging again.
This package then went to Scorsese, who might have turned it into a mannerist exercise, like Cape Fear, but instead directed the movie as if every moment meant life or death, not just for the characters but for himself.
…most fascinating films -- and his best effort since Cape Fear.
Some critics have likened “The Departed” to one of Scorsese’s B-movie type entertainments, like the 1991 “Cape Fear”.
The genre was launched with the 1962 Cape Fear (and its John D. MacDonald source novel), whose killer not only tracks down the lawyer who prosecuted him but terrorizes the man's wife and child.