Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991, USA)

As a feverishly intelligent neo-noir experiment by a Movie Brat at the top of his form, it's comparable to De Palma's Femme Fatale, and though it lacks some of that film's wicked humor (a slow push-in on a teddy bear's face to the re-recorded Herrmann score is an obvious exception), for most of its running time, Cape Fear acts as a brilliantly, visually alive conversation about the movies. Scorsese's usual preoccupation with his favorite leading man is present here, but far more interestingly so as he uses the unstoppable Max Cady (the accent is great, and De Niro stops thankfully short of a Mitchum impression) as a probe with which to dissect the Hollywood thriller. The Peck and Mitchum cameos are also much more than respectful homage to a bygone era, as their minor characters both function as unhelpful (and potentially harmful) members of an ineffective system which cannot act to protect Sam Bowden and his family from a cunning lunatic. One of Scorsese's many changes to the material makes Nolte's Bowden a hypocritical two-timer who sneaks around with a young legal secretary and, many years ago, sabotaged Cady while acting as his defense attorney. "If you saw what he did to that girl!" he pleads self-righteously. Later, he reads the book of Job in bed and indirectly compares himself to a humble man of God who had everything taken away from him. Relentlessly complex, Cape Fear doubles in on itself over and over again, a film about how people re-interpret themselves and their situations through art. In the most captivating scene (apparently improvised in one take), Cady lures Danielle Bowden (a young Juliette Lewis) to her high school basement auditorium, where he emerges from the shadows of a Candyland-like set to prey on her insecurities and emerging desires, updating the black-and-white expressionism of The Night of the Hunter with gaudy colors and characters both fully conscious of the sexual charge in their conversation. In Scorsese's post-modern world, everyone knows too much (the psychopathic Cady talks at length about how he educated himself in prison), and struggles to interpret the world in a positive way for themselves. The image of Bowden's bloody hands washed clean easily in the surging river demonstrates how simply the appearance of a thing can be manipulated. Small observations: one of the best title sequences I've ever seen. I often wish that there could be a film with modern actors that really had the look and feel of an older, Technicolor film. This, made 20 years ago, is pretty close. My favorite film by Scorsese, and after The King of Comedy, his most unfortunately neglected.