He’s Out Now: ‘Cape Fear’ (1962)
Robert Mitchum up there — he’s the reason Cape Fear is a movie worthy of its title, and of its reputation. He brought to this role just the right measure of menace and charm, and what’s so scary about his Max Cady is that you kind of like him — hell, you might even find yourself rooting for him — as he terrorizes this innocent family. Maybe some of that has to do with the father being played by Gregory Peck, so annoyingly sanctimonious as Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird (released later that same year). Mitchum knew his character was meant to be a charmer, and indeed, the first time he read the script, it came as news to him at the wild ending that Cady wasn’t in fact the hero of the piece.
Peck himself was producing. J. Lee Thompson was the director Peck plucked for the job, based on their experience together making The Guns of Navarone (1961). When the two first approached Mitchum about taking the role of Cady, he declined, claiming he was due a long rest after a recently completed stretch of heavy work. But he liked the script and the way it showed how crooked the cops could be. (Mitchum had had his share of trouble with the law.) So they asked Mitchum to recommend his own substitute, suggesting perhaps Jack Palance. No way, Mitchum said. “The whole thing with Cady, fellas, is that snakelike charm. Me, officer? I never laid a hand on the girl, you must be mistaken.”
In the original novel, Cady isn’t nearly so charming; that’s something Hollywood gave him. The book is called The Executioners (1958), and for all the talents of its author, one thing John D. MacDonald didn’t provide was a Cady of charisma. Maybe he didn’t want to. Anyway, what we get in The Executioners is a rather nondescript heavy with no memorable lines and a history of raping young teenagers. It’s hard to stir sympathy out of that combination. As reimagined by Mitchum and the screenwriter James R. Webb, Cady’s criminal history is softened, and his lecherousness joined by wit and playfulness — an irresistible mischievousness.
Although the Cady of Cape Fear — unlike the Cady of The Executioners — has only grown women on his rap sheet, he does covet Sam Bowden’s (Peck’s) teenage daughter, Nancy (Lori Martin). This is more than enough to make him evil, while also rendering him just palatable enough for his purposes here, which is to serve as a figure we can at least see as human. It was Bowden who, back in their Army days, had given the testimony that sent Cady away for sexual assault. That was almost a decade ago, and Cady’s out now.
Bowden is a lawyer, prosperous, wife and children, dog. When Cady comes to their town after his release to terrorize the whole family, Bowden finds he has to personally confront like never before some of the finest ideals of his chosen profession: innocent-till-proven-guilty; don’t-take-the-law-into-your-own-hands. He gets cops and PIs to trail Cady and try to scare him out of town, even hires some thugs to rough him up when none of that works, but this Max Cady is just too smooth for all that — too tough and too crafty and too damn cool.
MacDonald’s Cady is a nebulous, often invisible figure, spending most of the novel “somewhere in this night, breathing the darkness,” while Mitchum’s Cady makes himself all too visible for Bowden’s taste — teasing and taunting him, snatching the keys out of his car in the courthouse parking lot so they can catch up on old times. “Hello, counselor,” he says. “Remember me? Baltimore. Eight years, four months, and 18 days ago.” Bowden remembers. “Good. I wouldn’t wanna think you’d forgotten me.” Bowden is incredulous that Cady would think him responsible for Cady’s crimes. “You still don’t get the picture, do you, counselor? Well, I can see this is gonna take a little time — a lot of time.”
This dialogue, in The Executioners, is quickly dispatched in a conversation between Bowden and his wife, Carol (Peggy for the movie), when Sam tells her that during the encounter Cady “was having a dandy time. He knew that I was squirming.”
That’s it.
Another choice moment in the film is when the police come to a local watering hole to take Cady downtown for questioning. As Cady leaves the bar with them — calmly, cooperatively — he turns and says to this dish sitting at a high-top table with her boyfriend, “I’m gonna give you just one hour to get rid of your friends.” “Are you trying to pick me up?” “Yes.”
Again, in The Executioners the scene is a vague anecdotal bit of business discussed between Sam and his wife: “They plucked him out of a Market Street bar yesterday afternoon. Captain Dutton says he made no fuss. Very mild and patient about the whole thing.”
Yeah, something like that.
These are prime examples of how — through charismatic acting and inventive screenwriting — a pretty good book becomes a masterpiece of a movie.
Sometimes you find poetry on a map. That’s what Peck discovered when he traced his finger up the East Coast of the United States looking for his terrain of terror. Sure enough, there it was, in the state of North Carolina: Cape Fear River. Suddenly his movie had a name.
And in Alfred Hitchcock, the movie had something of a father figure. Although “Thompson did not set out to deliberately evoke Hitchcock,” according to the wonderful resource Alfred Hitch-blog, Cape Fear does feature
an editor, music composer, two art directors, a leading actor and a supporting actor who were all associated with Hitchcock, so it is hard to avoid comparison. It is not a true Hitchcock movie in theme or in style, although in camera movements, in economy of shots, in the tightness of the editing, in the evocative score of Bernard Herrmann, it is very Hitchcockian indeed.
We hear the music of Herrmann before we even see the movie — it jumps in during the studio identification — and it’s as jarring as ever, insistently proclaiming the terrifying nature of what we’re about to witness, its “dissonant string combinations,” in the words of Herrmann’s biographer, “suggest[ing] the workings of a killer’s mind” — which is important, since the movie is an hour and 28 minutes old before our man kills anything other than a dog.
The editor referred to above is George Tomasini — veteran of all Hitch’s very best films — who had an uncanny knack for rendering Thompson’s own vision. His sense of suspense and pacing ran like a language through his subconscious, all habit and instinct by this point. Once Tomasini had made the main cut, Thompson would come in and refine what he’d done until it conformed precisely with his expectations. Theirs was a wonderful professional partnership, of the kind we all wish we could have more of.
Martin Balsam was a Psycho (1960) alum favored by Thompson, who after interviewing him “knew that he was absolutely right for the part.” Robert F. Boyle was a set designer who had worked on at least four Hitchcock films, and will forever have the distinction of being the man who re-created Mount Rushmore for North by Northwest (1959), when the production was denied permission to shoot there. Cape Fear’s other art director, Alexander Golitzen, meanwhile, had won an Oscar for his work on Hitch’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). Hell, even Gregory Peck his own self had worked with Hitchcock, starring in Spellbound (1945) and The Paradine Case (1947).
Having worked as Hitchcock’s dialogue coach on Jamaica Inn (1939), Thompson remembered, “I saw the great master at work….[I]t is one of my precious memories that I saw him closely…at work. He had everything plotted down to the last detail.” On another occasion, Thompson said that he stood “in awe of Hitchcock,” and admitted that “when I come to a scene, I can’t help but wonder how Hitchcock would do it,” observing further one of the not-so-secret recipes of the Master of Suspense: “Hitchcock…liked to let the audience know, and [for] the person on the screen not to know.”
This last element is of course one of the great sources of Cape Fear’s appeal, because for all of the Bowdens’ uncertainty, we sit in cozy comfort knowing that the the killer has not gone away, and that something, ultimately, is going to have to give. Who among us, sickened by the saccharine sanctimony of Peck’s Atticus Finch in Mockingbird, doesn’t glow just a little inside as Bowden — Peck now playing another dear-old-daddy lawyer — sits his family down and says, “Eight years ago I was a witness against a man and he was sent to prison, and the thing is, he’s out now, and blames me for his conviction.”
There’s a scene in The Executioners in which Bowden (as so often in the novel) is talking with his wife, about his recent decision to hire some men to beat the shit out of Cady. Carol’s all behind the idea, positively enthused by it, says she would even put up the money herself (quite the commitment from a 1950s housewife). But Sam isn’t so sure. Sam’s got Ethics, you see, and his qualms about the plan are genuine. “Suppose a disappointed client decided I needed similar treatment?” Bowden says semi-Socratically. “If he had the right contacts, he could get the job done. It makes the world sound like a jungle. There’s supposed to be law and order.”
I’ve extracted this specimen of dialogue not because I wish to discuss the same ethics that so fascinate Bowden, but because this scenario — Bowden being hunted by “a disappointed client” — is precisely the premise of the remake Martin Scorsese did in 1991, with a script by Wesley Strick. That’s a more compelling setup, I believe — much more compelling than: these two guys happened to cross paths, one testified against on the other, and now he has to pay the price. It was Strick and Scorsese’s genius to go instead with: guy was hired to defend unsavory client, intentionally tanked the job by suppressing mitigating evidence, and now he has to pay the price.
Scorsese’s is not a film that otherwise angles toward subtlety — it’s the cinematic equivalent of De Niro’s High Southern-drawling, hamboning shamelessness in the lead role — but it definitely gets this part right. Not only does this distribute a greater portion of our sympathy to Cady; it presents a more satisfying explanation for how these two met in the first place. Sam is, after all, a lawyer. Why make his being a lawyer incidental the story when it could be made integral, acquiring plausibility for the whole thing in the bargain?
In Savannah, Georgia, where most of the movie was filmed, Mitchum had in his wayward youth done time on a chain gang for vagrancy and theft — five prisoners to a chain that ran through ankle clamps, hauled out in a truck each day for road repair. Now that he was back, under altogether different circumstances — now that he was out — he seemed possessed by a strange kind of energy that manifested itself in his offscreen behavior, best summarized by Mitchum himself when he warned Thompson as shooting got underway, “You know, I live a character, and this character drinks and rapes.” He often talked proudly of not going for Method or other acting techniques (“I have two acting styles. With and without a horse”), but sometimes Method acting, even Mitchum had to concede, could be a hell of a lot of fun.
In his splendid biography, Lee Server writes of how “Mitchum roamed the set, bare-chested, sweating, building himself into a rage. There was no joking with the crew.” Thompson remembered him as being “like a fireball. You felt any moment he would explode, an eruption. We got ready for it, and we talked over the action. But there was no rehearsal. I thought we should just do it. We just talked it over a bit what they should do and added things, invented on the spur of the moment.”
One thing they did talk about was the warning signal Peck would give Mitchum during the attack scene on the lake, tapping him on the leg when he’d been underwater for too long. Mitchum, though, was so possessed that, even with this system in place, Peck almost drowned. Polly Bergen (Peggy) threw her back out during her own fights scene with Mitchum. Meanwhile, Barry Chase — as Diane, the woman Mitchum picks up at the bar, and whom he later assaults — was in a scene in which Mitchum was being so rough with her, “I had to stop filming at one or two points to let things cool down,” remembered Thompson. “But I was certainly glad to get it all on camera. Barrie Chase was frightened of him; I know that because she told me so. She admired him, as everyone did. But, you know, he made people frightened.”
It was that kind of production, and Cape Fear is that kind of movie. When you consider how powerful Mitchum’s character is, and the extent to which that power motors this movie, you really have to respect Peck for not disappearing entirely — for not becoming nothing but a face on the screen. It took a strong presence to stand up against what Mitchum was delivering here; and as the hard shell protecting his moral code begins to break and then shatters, we see an anger that is all the more terrifying for where it originated. This is a movie not afraid to throw its blacks up against its whites, to see just how many subtle, sublime shades of gray can emerge from the shadows that confusion creates.
