From The Irish Independent
While surfing channels recently I came across a late-night screening of Martin Scorsese's 1991 thriller Cape Fear. Like most people I'm a huge admirer of Scorsese's films but have always thought this is one of the worst of them -- and as I watched it again my worst suspicions were confirmed.
A master director like Scorsese was well able to keep the tension going, but seemed unable to decide whether the prevailing mood in his remake should be irony or fear. And surprisingly, the film's weakest link is Robert De Niro.
As a result perhaps of his director's uncharacteristic indecision, De Niro's portrayal of cheery southern psychopath Max Cady quickly descends into an overblown caricature, and is about as scary as a trip to Santa's grotto. In fairness, De Niro has hardly ever been bad in anything, before or since, but his performance and Scorsese's film match up very badly against the excellent 1962 original.
Appearing in small parts in Scorsese's remake were the two stars of the first Cape Fear, Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum. Peck brought a sort of moral authority to every role, but it was Mitchum's sneering sadist Max Cady that made the original film so memorably disturbing, and perhaps he's the real difference between the two versions.
He and Robert De Niro couldn't have been more different in their approach to acting, and when they first performed together in The Last Tycoon in 1976, 'Mitch' made fun of De Niro's insistence on staying in character between shoots.
Throughout his long career Mitchum made light of his chosen profession and was fond of saying things like, "I got three expressions, looking left, looking right and looking straight ahead". But this bluster may have been a front because behind it all Mitchum seems to have been a dedicated and surprisingly versatile actor.
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