As the final moments of Cape Fear came to a close with a zoom-in on Juliette Lewis’s eyes and a half-heartedly delivered epilogue about how she and her family never spoke about what happened with Max Cady with one another, I turned to my viewing companion and asked, “Wait, was this a bad movie?” to which he replied “I think it might have been.” But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

It came up months ago in a discussion about Goodfellas in the opening segment of our podcast episode about Nowhere, but I have a pretty big Martin Scorsese gap in my film knowledge. Until this year, I thought I had seen only one of his films, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (which was discussed in the opening segment of our podcast episode about Richard III), although further review of his filmography revealed that I had also seen two movies that I didn’t realize were his: the concert film The Last Waltz and Shutter Island, neither of which I initially connect to him because, in the case of the former, it’s not very much like his primary body of work, and in the case of the latter, it wasn’t a very good movie. Since then, I’ve also seen Casino (discussed in our Junk Head episode) and Taxi Driver (discussed in our Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie episode), and now we can add Cape Fear to the list, although I had kind of already seen it given that it forms the basis of the Simpsons episode “Cape Feare,” which I would conservatively estimate that I have seen one hundred times. 

A remake of the 1962 film directed by J. Lee Thompson starring Gregory Peck as a lawyer stalked and harassed by a recently released felon played by Robert Mitchum, Scorsese’s Cape Fear casts Nick Nolte as Sam Bowden, a former Atlanta public defender now living in North Carolina. His wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) is a graphic designer and their daughter Danielle (Lewis) is a high school student whom they have enrolled in summer school to punish her for smoking pot. Bowden is also carrying on an emotional (but not physical—yet) affair with a county clerk employee named Lori (Ileana Douglas). It isn’t his flirtation with infidelity that turns his life upside down, however, but the release of Max Cady (Robert De Niro), a man Sam dismissively refers to as a “Pentecostal hillbilly,” the scion of a family of snake-handling whom Sam unsuccessfully defended against a charge of aggravated rape of a sixteen-year-old girl. During the trial, Sam followed his personal ethics while simultaneously committing dereliction of his duty as Cady’s appointed advocate by burying evidence that Cady’s victim was characterized as “promiscuous,” which would have allowed Cady to argue down to a lesser sentence. Sam assumed that this would never come to light since Cady was illiterate, but in the fourteen years that he spent in prison, Cady has not only learned to read but has studied philosophy, theology, and the law. Using his new knowledge, Cady sets about tormenting the Bowden family while always remaining just within the allowance of legal statutes and using Sam’s defensiveness and hot temper against him by goading him into starting altercations. When Cady assaults Lori after taking her home from a bar because he knows that she, with her knowledge of how her sexual and personal history will be dragged out in front of a courtroom full of her co-workers, will refuse to press charges, things take a turn for the violent, and things get worse for the Bowdens and their allies from there. 

It’s impossible to talk about this film in 2025 without taking it into consideration with the indelible pop cultural impression that its Simpsons adaptation left on the greater consciousness. “Marge on the Lam” will never be more famous than Thelma & Louise; “Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(d’oh)cious” will never be better remembered than Mary Poppins; and “Rosebud” will never touch the widespread cultural importance of Citizen Kane. But Cape Fear? It may be less famous than “Cape Feare.” It doesn’t hurt that it’s widely considered one of the series’ best episodes, usually appearing in various top ten lists, and it’s a personal favorite of mine. When it comes to Sideshow Bob episodes, I think that I would give the edge to “Sideshow Bob Roberts” by just a hair because of that installment’s biting political edge, but “Cape Feare” is the funniest by a wide margin. Even if you’re someone who’s never seen the show, the omnipresence of memes that originate from it mean that it’s given us some of the longest lasting Simpsons jokes and images, like Homer’s extreme stupidity rendering him unable to respond to the name of his witness protection identity, Homer’s frightening offer of brownies and brandishing of a chainsaw on the “Thompson” family’s houseboat, and, of course, Bob and the rakes. It’s with this in mind that I offer the possibility that this movie was not intended to be as comedic as I found it, which contributed to a feeling of overall tonal whiplash and inconsistency that made it a strange text to interact with. That, combined with some experimental filmmaking choices that range from the interesting to the absurd, make for a film that is overall less than the sum of its parts. 

Despite the main conflict of the film happening between Nolte’s Sam and De Niro’s Cady, the most powerful scenes in this film are those that feature the film’s talented roster of actresses acting against one of them. Cady’s semi-seduction of Danielle by calling her the night before summer school starts to pose as her new drama teacher and direct her to the theatre in the film’s basement for “class” the next day, where he preys upon the fifteen-year-old’s desire to be treated more maturely, is skin-crawling, and Lewis plays Danielle perfectly in this scene —  disturbed but intrigued, flattered in spite of herself, and frighteningly naive. Lange gets two big scenes. While her big monologue in the finale, in which she attempts to redirect Cady’s imminent sexual violence against Danielle back onto herself by flattering him and lying about an emotional connection, is quite good, it’s the earlier scene in which she accuses Sam of sleeping with Lori after hearing him sounding overly concerned on the phone that is her powerhouse moment. She’s a tornado of fury, and it’s fantastic to witness. In Ileana Douglas’s penultimate scene, Sam comes to her in the hospital after Cady has beaten and sexually assaulted her, and we get our first glimpse of just how dangerous and vile a man Cady is; Lori has been brutalized. Douglas gives what may be a career-best performance delivering a harrowing monologue about what it’s like to be a woman who’s witnessed the justice system act as a secondary violating entity in the way that it forces the events to be revisited and picked over, examined and re-examined and cross-examined, and how often justice fails to be served in spite of all of it. 

It’s a gut-punch of a scene (genuinely the film’s greatest), one that’s immediately followed by one in which the furious Sam demands takes his anger out verbally upon sympathetic police lieutenant Elgart (Robert Mitchum, who previously portrayed Cady in 1962), who ends the scene with the uproariously funny line “Well, pardon me all over the place.” He’s not the only returning actor from the earlier film to appear in a scene that borders on camp in tone, either, as Peck portrays Lee Heller, an attorney that Cady engages to file a restraining order against Sam when Sam’s private investigator Kersek (Joe Don Baker) hires some goons to rough Cady up, in which Cady manages to get the upper hand. Heller appears in court wearing a suit that’s several sizes too big for him while Peck affects a Southern accent, to the effect that he feels like he’s a simple hyper chicken from a backwoods asteroid costumed by David Byrne. Cady himself is an interesting case, as De Niro plays him as a truly terrifying man, driven and determined and focused, with nothing but hatred and revenge in his heart. On the other hand, Cady is a clownish figure, dressing in garish clothing of various bold prints (notably, Cady also continues to wear bellbottoms in several scenes, which would have been the style at the time that he was sentenced in 1977), and his menace is undercut by some of De Niro’s choices to go a little “broad.” Or am I just too Simpsons-pilled? Do I read the scene in which a severely dirtied Cady detaches himself from the bottom of the Bowden’s Jeep Cherokee after they’ve driven out to Cape Fear as campy and funny because I’ve seen Sideshow Bob do it countless times? Am I not supposed to be laughing when Cady finally dies, being dragged beneath the surging waters of Cape Fear when he starts speaking in tongues before singing a hymn about the River Jordan? It feels like I shouldn’t be given that mere moments before this Leigh and Danielle were in harrowing sexual danger, but I also can’t imagine that the film could expect me to take Cady’s dying glossolalia seriously either. “Cape Feare” is in such a rhetorical conversation with Cape Fear that it’s essentially paratext, so I have to consider that I’m biased not to take the film’s drama seriously, but I also don’t think that the shadow of “Cape Feare” is entirely to blame for a Cape Fear’s tonal failings either. 

One of the things that is most praiseworthy in the film is the moral dilemma that it posits. Sam unequivocally betrayed his oath and broke the law by suppressing evidence that would have reduced Cady’s sentence; there’s no argument about that. But Cady had already bragged to him about beating two previous aggravated sexual assault charges and when Sam witnessed the extent of his brutality toward his teenaged victim, he made what is a reasonable moral and ethical choice to ensure that Cady could not continue his reign of terror. Justice failed, and justice was served. This is ultimately what Cady discovered and what set him off on his violent revenge campaign, and it turns out that Sam did it all in vain, anyway. Cady insists he would have served the seven years he would have gotten with his reduced charges and considered it just, but by the time he had spent that amount of time incarcerated, he had already murdered another inmate and made it look like an accident. This open secret meant that the parole board never even considered his early release. If Sam hadn’t hidden the “exonerating” evidence, Cady would still have served the same amount of time. Violence simply begets; that’s its nature. If the film had spent a little bit more time on this topic, I think it might have been able to pull these disparate threads together, but it never really comes to the forefront. As it is, this one is composed of some great elements, but they don’t work together. You can’t take it as seriously as it sometimes demands because it’s a little too campy in certain places, but you can’t take it as a fully straightforward campy thriller-comedy not because it’s often too frightening but because the omnipresent threat of sexual violence makes it too dark to comfortably enjoy on that level. Less worthy as a whole than the combined value of its individual parts.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond