Cape Fear (1991) on Netflix
Released after serving fourteen years for rape and battery, Max Cady moves to New Essex, North Carolina. Sam Bowden, the public defender he blames for that sentence, lives with his family.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.3/10250,144 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes75%
Trailer
Plot summary
Max Cady has finished his prison term for raping and battering a teenage girl and is free. Fourteen years earlier, at Cady's trial in Atlanta, Sam Bowden, then his public defender, kept a police report about the victim out of the case, a document that could have shortened his sentence or cleared him, counting on Cady's illiteracy to keep it hidden. Cady learns to read in prison, teaches himself law and argues his own appeals. He moves to New Essex, North Carolina, where Bowden now works in private practice, and lets Bowden know he has arrived. Cady trails the family and frightens them, and Bowden's efforts to buy him off or to get the police to act go nowhere.
Cast
- Craig Henneas Prisoner
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Cape Fear (1991)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Steven Spielberg originally developed Cape Fear but decided it was too violent for him, so he traded it to Martin Scorsese in exchange for Schindler's List, a project Scorsese had decided not to make; Scorsese took the film out of gratitude to Universal for backing him during the controversy over The Last Temptation of Christ.
- Scorsese originally wanted Harrison Ford as lawyer Sam Bowden, but Ford only wanted to play villain Max Cady, so Nick Nolte, who wanted Bowden, talked Scorsese into casting him; Drew Barrymore and Reese Witherspoon both auditioned for the daughter role, and Spielberg had reportedly wanted Bill Murray as Cady.
- To make the shorter Robert De Niro seem as physically threatening as Nick Nolte on screen, De Niro bulked up with muscle while Nolte lost weight, and De Niro had his teeth ground down, sharpened and deformed for the role, later paying $20,000 to have the dental work reversed after shooting wrapped.
- The climactic storm sequence aboard the houseboat was actually filmed in a 90-foot water tank inside a soundstage that was specially built for the production.
- Cape Fear was Martin Scorsese's first film shot in the widescreen 2:35:1 CinemaScope format, and he hired cinematographer Freddie Francis specifically for the Gothic look Francis had brought to earlier films like The Innocents and his Hammer horror pictures.
- Cape Fear was the seventh film Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro made together, and it became the first Scorsese film ever to gross over $100 million.
- To reinforce the film's debt to Alfred Hitchcock, Scorsese had Saul Bass, one of Hitchcock's regular collaborators, design the opening titles, reused Bernard Herrmann's original 1962 score reworked by Elmer Bernstein, and recycled parts of Bass's own title footage from the unreleased ending of his film Phase IV.
- Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and Martin Balsam, who all starred in the original 1962 Cape Fear, returned for cameos in the remake, with Peck's appearance turning out to be the final theatrical film role of his career.
