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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 6, No. 10 |
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THE EXECUTIONERS and the Two 'Cape Fears' |
 The 1962 film |
J. Lee Thompson turned MacDonald's 1958 paperback novel 'The Executioners' into a stunning film called 'Cape Fear.' Then, in 1991, director Martin Scorsese remade 'Cape Fear' as a homage to the original film. from MacDonald's classic thriller? |
 The 1991 remake |
A riveting novel became
two classic film thrillers
of TheColumnists.com
In 1958, John D. MacDonald was the king of paperback thriller authors. He had not yet created his series character, Florida shamus Travis McGee, who would go on to be the central character in 21 subsequent novels, but he had written more than three dozen other popular novels, including a new one called "The Executioners."
This new book of his was a spellbinder with an evil character called Max Cady who drove the lean storyline. Cady had just been released from prison and was hellbent on revenge against the man who testified against him in court where he was convicted of f raping and savagely beating a teenage girl.
He comes to the rural village called Harper, near the larger community of New Essex, where he finds his man--Sam Bowden--working as a successful local lawyer and living comfortably with his wife and three children. His mission is to make Bowden know how it feels to lose everything.
"The Executioners" is a taut, fast-moving novel that's loaded with suspense, but also has much more going for it, including MacDonald's shocking exposure of how ineffective the law can be when it comes to protecting innocent people from a stalker like Max Cady, who carefully avoids breaking any laws, all the while he's moving in for the kill.
Ultimately, MacDonald forces his successful "civilized" family to set aside all its notions of right and wrong in order to defend itself against this vengeful force of nature gone mad. It is, in essence, an endorsement of vigilantism as a last resort.
A few years later, while playing the lead role in "The Guns of Navarone," actor Gregory Peck read "The Executioners" and thought it would make a sensational film. He was then producing many of his own films, so he took it to his "Navarone" director, J. Lee Thompson, to seek his opinion of its viability as a film. By the time Thompson finished the book, it was clear they wanted to do the film together, so they took the project to Universal studios.
The result is now regarded as one of the all-time classic thrillers--the 1962 film "Cape Fear," which Thompson directed, starring Peck as Sam Bowden and Robert Mitchum as Max Cady. Right away they began to re-conceive the novel for the screen, starting with its title, which they thought might give moviegoers the wrong idea about what they were going to see on the screen.
Peck liked what he called "geographical titles" like "Casablanca," so he pulled out a map of the U.S., ran his finger up the eastern seaboard in the vicinity of North Carolina, the general locale of MacDonald's story, and stopped when he found a spot called "Cape Fear."
Now called "Cape Fear," the project was almost certain to face censorship problems, even though Hollywood was in the midst of shedding a generation of rules. about the content and language in films. For one thing, Cady's plot for vengeance included his planned rape of Bowden's teenage daughter, a major "no-no" for movies in the early 1960s. Then there was the problem that Bowden eventually starts planning to murder Cady when he realized the law wasn't going to protect his family.
In the book, the trouble
between Cady and Bowden begins in the final days of World War
II when both men were in the Navy. Bowden was then a lawyer with
the Judge Advocate General's department, what we now know as
a "JAG" assignment. While off duty in Melbourne, Australia,
Bowden comes upon the drunken Cady and realizes the man is raping
and beating a 14-year-old girl in a dark alley. Summoning help,
Bowden sees Cady arrested and charged. Then he's required to
appear in court as the key witness.
Mainly because of Bowden's testimony, Cady was sentenced to a
prison term of life with hard labor. Cady was a battle-hardened
veteran with the rank of staff sergeant and had been in the service
seven years. He had just come off 200 days of combat and had
a bad case of nerves. Because of that mitigating factor, his
life was spared.
After the war, his sentence had been reviewed and Cady was released after completing 13 years of his life sentence. He emerged a bitter ex-convict whose own wife had left him and remarried. Before starting his life over again, though, Cady is determined to destroy Bowden and his family.
The screenplay by James
R. Webb made some fundamental changes. First, Bowden's family
was whittled down to size. His two sons were eliminated, leaving
only 14-year-old Nancy at home with her parents. The wartime
confrontation between the two antagonists is dropped and, instead,
we learn that Bowden witnessed the rape incident in Baltimore,
not Melbourne. Cady's time in prison was changed to eight years.
This uncomplicates the film's narrative because it reduces the
amount of background information we need and tends to focus our
attention on the teenage girl.
Webb kept the incident where Cady poisons the Bowden family dog,
but there's no longer the attempt to shoot one of Bowden's sons
because the sons aren't in the story anymore.
Director Thompson, who's British, had worked with Alfred Hitchcock in his youth when Hitch still was making films in his native England. He had adopted Hitchcock's approach to complex stories, which was to pare them down to the bone. He also had picked up lots of technique from Hitchcock, which clearly shows in "Cape Fear." He also hired Hitchcock's favorite composer, Bernard Hermann, to score "Cape Fear."
The other fundamental change from the book is the decision to move the showdown between Bowden and Cady to the Cape Fear river, putting everyone on board a houseboat. Once they decided to call the movie "Cape Fear," I suppose they had to go there somehow. It was a big improvement over MacDonald's showdown, which takes place in the Bowdens' home.
Gregory Peck, in some interviews conducted during the film's initial release, suggested he wanted to hire a powerful actor to play Cady, knowing full well the part was the juicier one and whoever played it might steal the picture. He was right. It seems clear to me that they wanted Mitchum for Cady because they remembered how nasty he was as the child-chasing killer in "Night of the Hunter" (1955). Mitchum fit the Cady role perfectly and did steal the picture.
In the DVD version of the first "Cape Fear," director Thompson refers to Mitchum as "explosive" and says that was just what was needed to make Cady come to life--the feeling that he was teetering on the edge and might erupt with violence at any time.
Thompson had hoped to hire Hayley Mills to play 14-year-old Nancy, but she was busy with back to back films for Disney. In her place, he cast young Lori Martin, who plays the part beautifully, but seems more child than blooming teenager. His other casting was flawless: Warm, cozy Polly Bergen as Carol Bowden; Martin Balsam as the police chief; Telly Savalas, in his pre-"Kojak" period, with hair, as a private eye who helps Bowden; Jack Kruschen as the defense counsel Cady hires and, most uniquely, dancer Barrie Chase as "Diane," a new character Webb created to replace the barfly that Cady rapes and beats up.
Hermann's intense score is one of the best he ever did. It was so good, in fact, that Martin Scorsese decided not to change it when he remade the film. Instead, he hired composer Elmer Bernstein to conduct it and use it to score the new film.
The original "Cape Fear" movie was a big hit and was acclaimed by critics. Looking at it with the perspective of the years, the film was a strong upgrade from the novel and, considering the censorship it faced, is still one of the grimmest, edgiest films of its era. It does make one giant concession, though: It lets Max Cady survive the showdown with Bowden, which he doesn't do in either the book or the 1991 remake.
The Scorsese version of the film originally was something Steven Spielberg wanted to direct. Both Spielberg and Scorsese were great admirers of the 1962 film, but Spielberg had too many other irons in the fire and Scorsese, who was then making "Goodfellas," didn't think he was the right person to remake a classic thriller, generally not the genre of film he prefers to make.
But Robert De Niro was intrigued by tackling Max Cady, a role with some considerable resemblance to his classic Travis Bickle character in Scorsese's "Taxi Driver." His passion for it was one of the factors that influenced Scorsese to take a serious look at directing the picture.
Ultimately, Scorsese began to believe it might be interesting for him to try and do a classic thriller, respecting all the conventions of the genre, but to also add depth and dramatic texture to it. Once he began working with screenwriter Wesley Strick, his vision for the new "Cape Fear" began to form.
The essential change for the 1991 "Cape Fear" is the insight it gives us into the family Cady is trying to destroy. It's not the happy husband, wife, three kids and a dog family of the book nor even the streamlined version of the same family in the 1962 film. This time, for example, Sam Bowden is carrying a small load of guilt over his original involvement with Cady. This time he's the former defense attorney for Cady and we learn he withheld evidence about the victim that might have brought a lighter sentence for Cady. He withheld it because he couldn't get over the explosive violence Cady had used to hammer the woman he raped. He wanted the man put away for a long time, which is not what a defendant hopes to get from his lawyer.
Bowden's marriage is also drawing near the rocks. His wife, whose name is now Leigh, is played by the volatile Jessica Lange, not the comfy Polly Bergen. Leigh suspects Sam of cheating on her, which he may be doing with his legal clerk (Illeana Douglas). The new version cleverly uses this new character of the clerk to replace the barfly character Barrie Chase played in the original. By making her an intimate of Bowden, her rape and beating serves as another shot Cady fires across Bowden's bow.
The Bowdens's daughter is a little older (15, going on 16) and is played by the quirky Juliette Lewis, who makes her predecessor in the role, Lori Martin, look like a cloistered nun in comparison. The daughter, who also is renamed "Danielle," smokes grass and reads porn novels (both supplied by Max Cady) and, in one sizzling scene with De Niro, seems about ready to do him, if he'll only be so kind as to show her how.
Replacing Gregory Peck as Sam is a slimmed-down and bookish Nick Nolte, who wears rimless spectacles and shows no signs of his usual scruffy-tough screen persona. He plays Sam as a man unsure of his own capacities and unable to control his own family, which his arch enemy Cady uses against him throughout the film.
Scorsese's film is much, much darker as it probes the human souls of the central characters. Lange's Mrs. Bowden seems so incurably hot that we never know for sure if she isn't a bit attracted by the heat emanting from Max Cady. At one point, she even thinks outloud, telling Sam that she wants to see how strong he is--or how weak.
Again, though, it's Max who steals the show. De Niro gobbles the screen as he ups the psycho-potential of this man, blends in a little Bible belt Pentecostal snake handler style and gives us an intensely physical performance--from his opening scene in prison, where we first see he's covered with wacko tattoos, to his climactic struggle with Bowden aboard a runaway houseboat during a tempestuous storm. (Both De Niro and Juliette Lewis were Oscar-nominated for their performances.)
If the original censors freaked over the 1962 "Cape Fear," they would have needed serious time in rehab after seeing the 1991 version. The scene where Max runs his thumb over the lower lip of the trembling Danielle and she begins to suck on it, tells you way more about this girl-woman than you probably want to know. Likewise, the violence is cranked way up until De Niro's Max seems some kind of indestructible monster after surviving beatings with chains, hot soup in his face and various other forms of stylized screen crucifixion.
Scorsese has acknowledged there was an attempt to pay homage to the original film, aside from the use of Hermann's powerful score. For one thing, he cast Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and Martin Balsam in cameo roles so they could play scenes with the actors who replaced them in their original roles. It's a wonderful little gimmick and it works in all kinds of ways.
Scorsese's version goes back to the original MacDonald showdown in the Bowden house, but then adds a second showdown aboard the houseboat in the Cape Fear river. Armed with the much more impressive digital special effects of today's films, Scorsese turns the finale into something truly awesome to behold.
To write this assessment, I re-read the original novel and re-screened both films, all within three days. That way, the changes are readily apparent. They all seem to work for me, too. The book is as good as it ever was nearly 50 years later. But now I can truly appreciate how well-served MacDonald was by the filmmakers who brought his work to the screen. Both films are classic movies. Who could ask for anything more?
©2005 by Ron Miller.
The illustrations are copies of the Universal DVD editions of
"Cape Fear" and are ©1961, 1991 by Universal.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about mysteries on television for MYSTERY SCENE magazine
and teaches classes in mystery and related topics at Western
Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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