"To reach paradise" (Cape Fear) (Patreon)

At the end of J. Lee Thompson’s classic psychological thriller Cape Fear, Gregory Peck is about to blow Robert Mitchum’s brains out. Mitchum has spent the preceding 100-odd-minutes brutalizing and raping women, terrorizing Peck’s family, threatening his law career, and worst of all, unsettling the sacred malaise of the suburban nuclear family. In a film as violent as Cape Fear, it makes sense for Peck to finally succumb to the violence around him and kill this vile creature.

But then the Hays Code, the Holy Scripture of the American nuclear family, steps in to save suburbia from itself. Peck declares that killing Mitchum off “would be letting you off too easy,” and that he must languish in a prison cell “until the day you rot!”

Here’s the massive logical problem: Mitchum has spent the entire movie gaming the criminal justice system. He is a jurisprudential genius who confounds Peck with his exploitation of legal loopholes. There’s absolutely no guarantee that this will change if Mitchum is sent back to court. It’s an absolutely absurd development that undermines what up to this point has been a strong and scary exploration of the fragility of criminal justice and how the nuclear families that sustain it get caught in the crossfire. Then we’re left with a cowardly ending where Gregory Peck is rewarded for his faith in the system, and the world stays exactly the same. Predictable for the Hays Code era, but ruthlessly disappointing. As an acquaintance on Twitter pointed out, the ending of the Simpsons parody of this movie makes more sense.

Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear has no delusions about the fragility of the nuclear family. Nick Nolte, stepping into Gregory Peck’s shoes, is an emotionally absent philanderer, too caught up in his law career and dalliances with female colleagues to tend to his disintegrating family. Robert De Niro, turning Robert Mitchum’s character into a calculated but unhinged incubus, is able to exploit Nolte’s blind spots with ease. He grooms Nolte’s daughter (who’s brilliantly elevated by Juliette Lewis), telling her exactly the right things to turn her against her father and, more crucially, turn her father against her. Nolte’s emotional affair with a younger employee ultimately makes her a target of De Niro. In the final score, Nolte has nearly as much blood on his hands as De Niro.

Scorsese’s Cape Fear deconstructs its source material, which is unusual for Scorsese, who’s generally uninterested in deconstruction. He finds some of the ideas embedded in the original and digs them to the surface. While a lot of the original Cape Fear’s power comes from its subdued neuroses, they clearly work against it in the long run. In the original film, Peck is simply outmaneuvered by someone smarter than he is. Scorsese has Nolte repeatedly fuck up. His attempt to protect his own house from De Niro gets two people killed.

De Niro just about sees through walls in the remake. He’s clearly some kind of demon — or worse, God Himself — wandering the earth, quoting Scripture while ravaging women. When De Niro drowns at the end, singing hymns, he knows exactly where he’s headed. And when he locks eyes with Nolte as he’s submerged in Cape Fear, he knows he’s won. Nolte clambers back onshore and joins his family. Everybody knows the Hays Code lost. With the Cape Fear remake, Scorsese gives the Hays Code the demon it deserves.