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 original's upstanding attorney with Nick Nolte's character’s hormonally confused daughter, a brooding adaptation of the original Bernard Herrmann score courtesy of 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 '90s Noir