Cape Fear

Director: Martin Scorsese

1991 / 128min / 35mm

Scorsese’s baroque remake of J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 potboiler of the same name, about a defense lawyer terrorized by a former client, improves on its inspiration in almost every regard, not least in replacing Gregory Peck, as the original’s upstanding attorney, with Nolte, playing a far more compromised version of the same character. Add to this Robert De Niro as the film’s self-styled Übermensch psychopath, Juliette Lewis as the Nolte character’s hormonally confused daughter, a brooding adaptation of the original Bernard Herrmann score courtesy Elmer Bernstein, and the lurid cinematography of Old Master Freddie Francis, and you’ve got one of the most distinctive thriller/morality tale/revenge tragedies of the ’90s.

Part of Up the Nolte