Cape Fear is a noir-thriller starring Gregory Peck Robert Mitchum, Telly Savalas, Polly Bergen, Lori Martin, Martin Balsam, and Barrie Chase.
Attorney Sam Bowden (Peck) gets approached by a scary-looking dude named Max Cady (Mitchum), who was sent to prison for rape (but the censors don't let them say the word, so it seems like maybe assault at first). Now that he's out, he blames Bowden and decides to make his life a living hell. He does this by not-too-subtly threatening Bowden, and Bowden takes the bait like a chump, enlisting his buddy Chief Dutton (Balsam) to roust Cady. Problem is, Cady's not an idiot and he's been studying law in prison, so he manages to stay just on the right side of the law (and this even though they try to get him on bullshit laws like "vagrancy" (not having enough money, wtf) and "lewd vagrancy" (having...sex with a woman in an apartment? I really don't know what that's supposed to mean)).
But Cady stays one step ahead, poisons Bowden's dog (the real hero here, obviously), and then hires an attorney (Jack Kruschen) who would not be out of place in an episode of Law & Order and threatens to sue if this "harassment" continues. Cady also brutalizes a woman he was seeing (Chase), and rather than testify she flees town. All the while, Cady turns up and taunts Bowden's wife (Bergen) and young daughter (Martin), but makes it very clear that he plans to go after them at some point.
Eventually Bowden sets up a trap, lures Cady to a house boat in Cape Fear (title drop), and manages to get the better of him, but not before Cady murders a sheriff's detective (Page Slattery) and nearly rape his wife and daughter. And then Bowden shoots him in the face, right? Nope, he makes a citizen's arrest to send Cady back to prison, and we get to see Cady look scared for the first time in the movie.
Most people are familiar with the 1991 remake with Robert De Niro (or the Simpsons parody), but I haven't seen it and I hadn't seen this until last night. Reading the synopsis of the remake, though, it looks very much like they're both products of their time. The connection between Cady and Bowden is much more personal in the remake (Bowden was Cady's attorney, rather than just a witness against him and a lawyer just sort of incidentally), and of course Cady dies at the end. Here, the Hitchcock influences are much stronger, as is the noir sensibility, but it also has a weirdly pat ending - not Bowden sending Cady to prison, but just the Bowden family boating back home and no mention at all of the fact that Bowden was facing disbarment and disciplinary proceedings. I think we can lay that firmly at the feet of the censors, but it did remind me of The Bad Seed a bit, where a perfectly good ending had to be tweaked because someone got their moral knickers in a twist.
But enough about that. The tension in this movie is amazingly built, and Robert Mitchum is amazing at being a dangerous, lurking figure in the background (Night of the Hunter is one of my favorite movies, and you get to see it there, too). Peck, likewise, plays a man desperate to protect his family but trying, at least at first, to take the high road, and learning what all of us in the US have learned over the past 10 years or so - you can't take the high road with someone who doesn't even know what "roads" are. Apparently there's another remake coming with Javier Bardem as Cady, and that's good casting. Hopefully it actually happens.
I did wonder why Bowden never filed a civil suit against Cady, since he's clearly stalking him, but this is 1962, maybe civil suits weren't a thing.
My Grade: A-
Rewatch value: Medium-low
Next up: Cat People
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