Spoilers Below
In 1961, after filming The Guns of Navarone under the direction of J. Lee Thompson, Gregory Peck hired Thompson to direct a film adaptation of novel for which Peck bought the rights for his production company, John D. MacDonald's' The Executioners. Not liking the title, Peck changed it to Cape Fear, since he believed films named after places did very well commercially. And just typing the words Cape Fear alone bring to mind Bernard Herrmann's classic score. While the film has bee overshadowed by its 1991 remake, directed by Martin Scorsese, Thompson's original is still a startling, tight-knit thriller of psychological torture. It's also one of the best riffs on Alfred Hitchcock ever made. This essay will delve in to the master's influence on the film in terms of style and narrative.
Like Hitchcock's films, Cape Fear explores the intersection of normalcy and psychopathy. Think of Shadow of a Doubt, where a serial killer returns to his quaint home town, or of Strangers on a Train where a tennis pro gets embroiled in the plot of a psychopath. In Psycho, Hitchcock showed us the darker side of seemingly ordinary people like Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a bank clerk who steals money from a client. Her path crosses with hotel proprietor Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), another seemingly ordinary, if slightly strange man, who is eventually revealed as the titular psycho. Then there there's Rope, where a dinner party is taking place in the unknown presence of a corpse and two murderers. In Cape Fear a ordinary lawyer, Sam Bowden (Peck) had prior to the events of the film intervened in the attack of a woman by Max Cady (Robert Mitchum). Bowden acted as a witness and got him convicted. At the film's beginning, Cady, now out of prison has come to Georgia, blaming Bowden for his conviction. So, like in Hitchcock we have the ordinary (Bowden and his wife and daughter) and the preternatural evil (Cady). Cady brutally beats a woman before and during the events of the film. He wants to rape Bowden's daughter, Nancy (Lori Martin), and even attempts to blackmail Bowden's wife (Polly Bergen) into giving consent to sex in exchange for sparing Nancy. He's a vile animal, a smart animal, but an animal nonetheless.
Hitchcock's villains often had similar qualities to Cady, a sort of otherworldly evil, and a lack of remorse for the crimes they've committed: Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton) in Shadow of a Doubt or Brandon Shaw (John Dall) in Rope. Brandon killed a college friend solely because he believed he was superior to him. And Charlie didn't think much of of his victims. Look at this exchange between him and his niece Little Charlie (Teresa Wright):
Uncle Charlie: The cities are full of women, middle-aged widows, husbands dead, husbands who've spent their lives making fortunes, working and working. And then they die and leave their money to their wives, their silly wives. And what do the wives do, these useless women? You see them in the hotels, the best hotels, every day by the thousands, drinking their money, eating their money, losing the money at bridge, playing all day and all night, smelling of money, proud of their jewelry but of nothing else, horrible, faded, fat, greedy women.
Young Charlie: But they're alive. They're human beings.
Uncle Charlie: Are they? Are they, Charlie? Are they human or are they fat, wheezing animals, hmm? And what happens to animals when they get too fat and too old?
Cady has this same hatred towards women. He got horrible revenge against his ex-wife for divorcing him and marrying a plumber, raping her, forcing her to write Cady a love letter than threatening to show it to the plumber if she ever phoned the cops. He views them as animals. Again, Cady has no remorse, blaming Bowden for winding up in prison. That's what makes him and the premise so terrifying. Interfere with evil and evil will bite you back. With Peck and Mitchum you have the perfect casting to represent these good and evil. Peck is the stalwart everyman, blandly likeable, conventionally handsome. Then you have Mitchum, a rougher kind of actor, whose face often seems drawn by someone rather than birthed. He often played anti-heroes but was capable of playing true, other-worldy, almost comedic evil, as in The Night of the Hunter, which I wrote about many years ago: Davies in the Dark: The Essential Films: "The Night of the Hunter" (1955) (thenoirzone.blogspot.com)
Coming back to Hitchcock, the director always had a distrust of the police, which can be seen in his work, which is full of innocent men on the run, attempting to prove their innocence. The law can't protect you in Hitchcock's world, and it can't in Cape Fear either. The film posits the law cannot protect you but can only respond to a crime. And even when Cady beats up Diane Taylor, she won't testify due to the fear of repercussions from Cady. Essentially, she wants to avoid being in Bowden's position. She can put him away but it won't stop him from coming back and exacting revenge. "No good deed goes unpunished" could've been the film's tagline. Bowden did the right thing in the law's eyes but now it can't remove Cady from Bowden's life. Bowden is a fine upstanding lawyer who believes he can get rid of Cady pretty easily with the help of his friend and police chief, Mark Dutton (Martin Balsam). You'll be forgiven if you assume Dutton will be seen climbing some stairs before getting stabbed, since Balsam will always be associated with Psycho. But no, Cady understands that he can psychologically torment Bowden and his family without breaking the law. . The only way the law will work in Bowden's favor is putting his family in extreme danger, putting them on a boat, so he can trap Cady in the act of attempted violence.I've talked about the thematic connections between Hitchcock's work and Cape Fear. Now, I want to discuss the stylistic similarities between the two. First, Bernard Herrmann, a frequent Hitchcock collaborator, was brought on to do the score. Like his score for Psycho, his theme for Cape Fear has a stalking terror- something evil is coming for you. Herrmann's scores fitted Hitchcock's expressive style-Hitchcock always wanted to communicate things without dialogue, i.e. visually and auditorily, so Hitchcock provided the images Herrmann's provided the emotion.
On the DVD making of documentary, director Thompson discusses how he studied Hitchcock, actually working with him in England years prior. Thompson says he always approached a scene wondering how Hitchcock would do it. One thing Thompson highlights about Hitchcock's style is that he always liked to clue the audience in on something the character didn't know. The footage shown while Thompson is talking is when of Cady's victims, deputy Kersak, who's protecting the Bowden women on a boat, is being stalked by Cady. This is quintessential suspense, obvious, maybe, but it was crucial to Hitchcock's approach to storytelling, the camera being a character that saw things others didn't, and was unable to prevent things.
Thompson also says he only saw the film in black and white, that the blacks and shadows would enhance the story, that color would ruin it. Like Psycho, it's hard to imagine the film being as effective in color. The world of both films exist in the shadows. Cape Fear's stark cinematography is courtesy of Sam Leavitt. His work provides much of the film's unnerving atmosphere. And it's just styilized enough without drifting in to complete unreality.
Another Hitchcock collaborator working on the film was Robert Doyle, Due to his own relationship with Hitchcock, knew what Thompson was looking for in terms of production design. For example, the bed that becomes a cage for Diane Taylor. Then there's the sequence where Nancy is behind a gate, being stalked by Cady. Thompson wanted to the gates to be black. The gates Thompson found were painted extra black by Boyle. What makes this sequence truly Hitchcockian is the payoff at the end when who we think is Cady following Nancy is someone else. George Tomasini, who edited Psycho and Vertigo, obviously knew what he was doing with the editing of that sequence.
Paying homage can result in a wane amalgamation of that person's style, but while Cape Fear may not be Rear Window or Psycho, it's a respectable and effective thriller that stands well amongst Hitchcock's ouevre. It doesn't force the Hitchcockiness but comes by it organically. It subtly reminds us of Hitchcock, why creating its own unique personification of evil in Max Cady. Mitchum's performance is arguably up there with Anthony Perkins in Psycho, Joseph Cotton in Shadow of a Doubt, and Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train. Bowden lets Cady live at the end, knowing he can punish him more by sending him to prison than killing him. I can understand why this can strike some as a cop out, that the film should've had Bowden cross the line, having Cady win. But I'd argue Cady has won, permanently scarring Bowden and his family. He's shown Bowden the lengths how the law, the thing he's dedicated his life too, won't protect him unless he goes to the methods he's gone, almost killing a man. We don't see the family happy at the end as they're being escorted home. They're silent, worn down by the ordeal through which they've gone. Just like the psychiatrist's explanation at the end of Psycho doesn't really matter because Norman can't truly be summed up so neatly, neither can this so story wrap up so easily. Both Norman and Cady can't allow a truly happy ending for anyone in their stories.
