Button Button Whose Got The Button

As the number one Richard Kelly apologist since 2006. It's my duty to inform you that The Box. No wait. Comeback.

Believe it or not the box is not as bad as you've heard. It's not a perfect movie by any stretch of the imagination. But it's an intelligent adult piece of science fiction with some great scenes and a mesmerizing central performance by Langella. Nothing would make me happier then to see it get a huge on Video success. I would also like a pony.

Seriously for all its flaws The Box feels like the work of a growing filmmaker. One who has truly taken the time to learn from his mistakes and evolve. And given its performance it might be awhile until Kelly gets a chance to. Man when Darko first came out and everyone started calling him the new Gilliam I bet he had no idea how scarily prophetic it would end up being.

Anyway give The Box a chance and it just might surprise you.

EDIT: I wrote another take on The Box for my column. Rather then risk open revolt by posting it as its own entity I thought I'd add it onto this one.

The Box was Richard Kelly’s bid for mainstream acceptance. Proof after the catastrophe that was Southland Tales that Kelly could play nice for the mainstream and create a movie that everyone could like. It didn’t work out that well. Instead of a safe by the numbers studio project The Box is a trippy, Sartre reverencing, expectation juking, mind fuck, that doubles as a serious morality play.

Just the sort of thing most people are looking for while they munch popcorn. Far from proving The director of Donnie Darko a safe bet, The Box flopped in theaters, and did only marginally well with critics. Luckily for Kelly, The Box is showing every sign of generating the kind of cult audience that saved Kelly’s career after Darko underperformed. With the T-Shirt ready iconic performance by Frank Langella (AKA I’m not Robert Loggia) score by Arcade Fire, and heady mix of style, ideas, and lunacy, its hard to imagine it doing otherwise.

The Box as it’s box office figures proved, isn’t for everyone, but those who it does connect with are going to be feeling the rarified jolt of cinematic ambrosia. Like The Sparse Moody Score by Arcade Fire, The Box at first appears to be doing very little, but reveals itself to be a rich, rewarding experience with further study. It’s one of those rare films that proves itself to be deeper and richer every time I watch it.

It opens with an upper middle class family in 1970’s Virginia, who find themselves on the receiving end of a very odd offer, given to them by the horrifically scared Mr. Seward, played by Frank Langella, with a mesmerizing polite malignance that’s worth the price of admission alone. Press the button that he has given to them, and someone “Who They Don’t Know” will die and they will receive a million dollars “Tax Free” (And remember these are seventies dollars) don’t press the button and well, in that case they get a pat on the back for being such good sports about the whole thing. Inevitably they press the button, and find the tables turned on them by a turn of phrase too good to spoil. Then things really get weird.

The rest of The Box is as heady, bizarre, and exhilarating as any of Kelly’s other’s films as our couple has to face Satanic Santas, The horrors of the Public Library, and K-Billy’s super sounds of the seventies. Though those put off by the purposeful obtuseness of Darko and Southland Tales should give this one a shot. Though Kelly isn’t interested in making it easy for you, all the pieces to solve the puzzle ARE here, and if you pay attention you can figure it out. I hope The Box finds the audience it deserves on DVD. Films as audacious as this deserve to be valued. So do filmmakers. I hope Kelly doesn’t find himself in director’s jail for too long over this. For all his flaws as a filmmaker (and as anyone whose watched Domino and Southland Tales knows, he has many) I can’t help but find movie theaters a more interesting place when a Kelly film is playing there.

White Lightning

(I mean holy Christ just look at this!)

Burt Reynolds has for whatever reason never really been my favorite member of the badass pantheon. I mean you have Clint Eastwood, and Charles Bronson, and Steve McQueen right next to him. Why would you’ve got porter house steak, what on earth would possess you to open up a tin of spam.

Maybe its because by the time I came of cinematic age he was already a punch line, maybe its because so many of his films are so frankly bad, maybe because he tied himself so thoroughly with Dom DeLuise. For whatever reason, the love I had for Burt Reynolds was like the love you have for a creepy uncle, who you can’t really hate because you know your Dad loves him. The Longest Yard is when he bought you a sandwich, Deliverance was him sending you twenty bucks on your birthday, just about everything else he made was when he took you alone inside his creepy van and showed you this.



Well those terrible memories exorcised thanks to White Lightening, which is the equivalent of your creepy uncle letting you borrow his new non creepy car for the weekend and finding a hundred dollars left for you in the glove compartment taped to a sack of weed. In short its pretty righteous. How righteous? Go back up and look at that poster. Click on it. Let the beauty really sink in. Not enough huh? Well how about this poster of Burt Reynolds as FUCKING ZEUS!

(Not pictured: Terrified Greek Peasant shitting his pants.)

White Lightning is the rarest of all things a grindhouse movie THAT LIVES UP TO ITS POSTERS!

White Lightning plays like a Drive By Trucker’s album on film. A tale of darkness, the south, manhood and vengeance. It is without reservation one of the greatest Hicksploitation films ever made.

White Lightning opens with two law officer’s paddling out into a southern swap. They tow a boat behind them which takes a minute to come into frame. And holy shit there’s two bound and gagged long hairs there, cinderblocks tied to their legs. The sequence is pretty fantastic, really drawn out and taking its time to exploit the hopelessness of the situation, aided immensely by Charles Bernstein’s sparse eerie score (used to great effect by Tarantino in Basterds). The law officers stop, untie their tow line and then almost casually blast a hole in the bottom of their victim’s boat with a shotgun, and watch as the frantic hippies sink into the fetid swamp…

Holy shit. Now that’s how you start a freaking movie. From the word go White Lightning lets you know it means business.

Unfortunately for the law officers they chose to kill the wrong hippies. Because next thing we know we’re in prison and Burt Reynolds is being informed of his brother’s death. Oops. Reynold’s with a year left on his sentence and not being the patient type, decides to turn states evidence to get to the corrupt sheriff behind it all.

White Lightning is an interesting film because it takes care to examine Reynold’s persona. He’s an informer, normally a cardinal sin in the movies even for the right reasons (has anyone ever rooted for the “hero” in White Heat?) but doesn’t really give a shit for the government or anybody else. He’s southern as a chicken coop but doesn’t fit in with the corrupt good ole boy culture of traditional Dixielanders, or the “new south” college kids who condescend to him when he tries to pump them for information. He’s not even really a rebel, he just stubbornly doesn’t belong.

The rest of White Lightning isn’t much different from your average Reynold’s vehicle, there’s car chases, moon shining, nekkid Daisy Mae types, cop hasslin’, and of course a good deal of wrasslin’. But its got a mean streak a mile wide that keeps it interesting, and Reynold’s hyper masculine presence holding it all together at the center. This movie just plain kicks ass.

The Road

Oddly enough the film that The Road reminds me the most of is American Psycho. Both are perfectly fine adaptations of books that really ought not be adapted. Both left me with the feeling that they probably represent the best adaptations of their source material. Practically platonic ideals really, keeping the essence of their stories intact, while toning down the parts that made them so prickly (The Road goes from mind numblingly bleak to merely depressing, American Psycho goes from sickeningly disturbing to a mere unsettling). And yet both left me with an oddly unsatisfied feeling. If you’re the reason we liked the source material was how different it was, then what’s to gain from an adaptation that tones down the very things that made it unique?

The Road, for those who missed it, became a bizarre best seller in 2006. Bizarre not because it’s a bad book. Like all of McCarthey’s work it’s superlative. But because its also phenomenally depressing. This is the only Pulitzer Prize winning, Oprah book club selection to feature the cooking and eating of a baby.



John Hillcoat proved to be an inspired choice to direct. His grim ass film The Proposition suggested that he was one of the few people who might actually be able to film Blood Meridian (this is a left handed compliment as anyone who has the balls to shoot Blood Meridian would have to be partially insane)

The film version of The Road has been toned down. But only just enough to make it bearable. The bleak vision of a world that has ended is intact. This isn’t something like The Book Of Eli or Mad Max. Something that humanity can eventually rebuild itself from. No the humans in The Road are like the last ants wandering around after some kid filled the hill with lighter fluid and tossed in a match. There’s no coming back.

The fact is the people in The Road are people for whom the phrase, “Nothing you do matters.” Is not a vagary of philosophy but a demonstrable fact. McCarthey’s book is about how it’s humanities impulse to try and do so anyway. The Road actually plays as a companion piece and counterpoint to McCarthey’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian. While Meridian posited that civilization was inherently doomed, because the savagery involved in its creation sowed the seeds of its inevitable destruction. The Road argues that the desire to create such civilization is equally unquenchable. Like the post hole digger at the end of Meridian the Father and Son will keep striking their sparks even in the face of the thing that says it will never sleep and never die. There’s nobility in that. And that’s good because you’re not going to find it anywhere else here.



“Carrying The Fire” is an able Viggo Mortenson bringing his trademark intensity to the role (As well as his trademark desire to show his junk in every movie he appears in, seriously is he in some kind of contest with Harvey Keitel?). He’s strong enough to carry the movie, which is good because aside from his son and a few looters and cannibals he’s about all there is in it. There’s something feral in Mortenson’s performance in the best sense of the word. The protection of his son is a primal instinctual thing. The scene where he bathes his son in the wake of an attack is moving both for its unexpected tenderness and the way that Mortenson so thoroughly resembles a Wolf with his cub. Charlize Theron show’s up in flashback’s as the films only real departure from the novel. Aside from having a place for another name on the poster, I don’t think this added anything to the film.

The boy himself, Kodi Smith McPhee wasn’t very strong in his role, but Mortenson shows such a close tie with him he makes his performance seem better then it is. Robert Duval, Guy Pierce, and particularly Michael K. William’s unforgettable and nearly unrecognizable as an unlucky thief.

The problem with the film is that The Road relied so heavily on McCarthey’s sparse, poetic, neo biblical prose, that it simply refuses to translate. It’s like trying to translate William Blake to film, and without McCarthey’s harsh prose etching out the characters and their world, the film turns into a long slog from horror to horror without a great deal to make it work on its own as a piece of art. For those pissed about how No Country For No Old Men played with the rules of narrative The Road will make you down right apoplectic.

Still the film deserved better then the shabby shrug of a release The Weinstein’s gave it, and the apathetic eye roll it got from Critics. The Road is perhaps in the final analysis an unsuccessful movie, but its not for lack of some truly fine filmmaking, or some truly haunting moments.

Cabin Fever 2

So a bit of background. Before making the great House Of The Devil West signed on to make a direct to Video sequel to Cabin Fever. It did not go well. Lionsgate kicked him off the picture and then extensively reshot and re edited the film. As a final insult, since West was not a member of the DGA he was not even allowed to Alan Smithee himself off the picture. As a result Lionsgate gets to ride the tide of good will From House Of The Devil despite totally fucking over West.

In short Lionsgate now gets to trap curious Horror fans with their usual DTV audience of the un discerning and the masochistic.

It should be noted that unlike many I actually kind of like both the original Cabin Fever and Eli Roth, despite the obvious flaws of both. Cabin Fever will never be a true classic, but it has its charm. It hits just the right note between the denizens of Traumaville and mainstream filmmaking, has a sense of humor but gets down to business when it needs to. Further more, Roth had both the balls to make Fever independently and the brains to get it picked up by a major studio and actually released. Neither are small things. He made and sold a successful R rated horror movie when such a thing was an oxymoron and you have to give him credit for that. It might be true that Roth’s true talents are those of a showman and a self promoter rather then a filmmaker, but neither are gifts that I rank cheaply (Roth may talk a better game then he plays, but its a lot of fun to hear him talk that game).

Despite knowing all this gory back story I couldn’t help but let my curiousity get the better of me. After all House Of The Devil was a tremendous film, and I couldn’t help but think even getting a glimpse of the real West underneath all the crap might be worthwhile. Well you can, but only glimpses. Look there was never going to be a chance that Cabin Fever 2 was going to end up a good movie anyway, but it did end up a pretty bad one. There are glimpses of Ti West here, but for every look at what he does well, there’s an equal but opposite scene where he throws up his hands and goes “Fuck it.” Cabin Fever 2 shows every sign of a film being cut down to the bone

While no one knows just what the nature of the rift between Lionsgate and West is, you might remember that in my House Of The Devil review I praised West as a master of the build up. I’m guessing that Lionsgate never know to be a studio all that enamored of the build up got sick of West trying to make a movie rather then a gag reel and booted him off the picture.

If this was the case, the plan backfired. Without West’s guiding hand Cabin Fever 2 merely feels slow rather then deliberate. Barely clocking in at eighty minutes, and that includes an animated nearly ten minute long credit sequence and a coda set in a strip club that defines superfluous.

The film itself follows the build up to a high school prom that has been infected with the flesh eating virus. We follow the usual gaggle of unfunny fat guys, losers, assholes, and unattainable dream girls, as one by one they start puking blood. Before you can say close up of a pus spewing penis, a government hit squad has sealed off the school and begun to systematically exterminate anyone who tries to escape. (On a side note its interesting how we’ve gone from the fifties’s “The Government Will Help You” to the seventies “The Government will try to help you, but will fuck it up” to now’s “The Government will straight up fucking murder you” in Rec, this and The upcoming remake of The Crazies”)

All the actors are terribly amateurish reading their lines in hurried gasps as if they just memorized them seconds before. Frankly its hard to believe that this kind of amateurishness came from a major studio. Even the DTV branch of said studio. Even though said studio is responsible for Saw… Ok now it makes more sense. But still.

The film’s lone bright spot comes from the previously insufferable Winston, you know the creepy deputy from the original who wanted to party. Though he only managed to be as annoying as sin the original he modulates his tone much better and in the interest of truth in criticism the way he delivered the line “Turn down the Sepultura and listen to me mother fucker.” Genuinely cracked me up. Plus he gets partnered with Larry Fesden (Whose presence only sadly reminded me that I could be watching a Larry Fesden movie) and Mark Boschardt who I’m always happy to see in a movie since it presumably means he can afford to buy food. Rider Strong makes the most out his brief cameo.

And I’m officially out of nice things to say about the movie. If Ti West makes good on his promise and becomes a great horror director (as I suspect he will) Cabin Fever 2 will be a fascinating watch. As is though its just kind of a waste of time.

Side Note:

The film is cheap that it features people drinking Red Oval. For those of you without a Trader Joes nearby, Red Oval is a beer that sells for a whopping total of 2.99 a six pack. It is so bad that the people who drink Trader Joe’s OTHER 2.99 a six pack beer Simpler Times (Like yours truly) look down on it. When you can’t afford Mickey’s or Natural Light for your film your good and fucked.

Shutter Island

I’d like to know what goat Dennis Lehane sacrificed to what long forgotten Sumarian God to get the kind of treatment he gets from Filmmakers. First Clint Eastwood and now Martin Scorsese, we’re talking about a man so lucky with adaptations that not even Ben Affleck can fuck him up. And I wouldn’t trust Ben Affleck to hold eggs.

So yeah one of favorite authors being adapted by my favorite filmmaker period, to say that my expectations for Shutter Island where astronomical would be an understatement. When I found out I was going to see the film in Austin I’m unashamed to admit that my thoughts abruptly blanked out into one long “SQUEEEE!” Somehow they where met. In fact this is one case where I would venture to say the adaptation is an improvement on the source material. As Scorsese brings one last turn of the screw that even Lehane didn’t have the torque to pull.

Though many might be worried by memories of Cape Fear, Shutter Island is about as far from that film as you can get in terms of control and tone.

Shutter Island for those who’ve somehow managed to miss the film’s gignormous marketing campaign, follows two Federal Marshall’s (or as Di Caprio’s Boston Accent puts it Federaaahlll Maaaahshaahlls) who investigate a missing persons case on an island prison in Massachusetts bay. After an investigation that seems beyond shady it seems like there might be some good old fashioned conspiring going on and before you can say “Giant hurricane hits the place releasing several of the island’s most dangerous prisoners,” things really go to shit.

For those who complained that The Departed was just Scorsese doing Scorsese (as if he should be doing something else. I mean why keep making brilliant, darkly spiritual dramas that vibrate with authenticity and style) Shutter Island has him at his most experimental since Bringing Out The Dead (And the film so far has been similarly polarizing with a sixty five on Rotten Tomatoes and a sixty four at metacritic). Shutter Island runs ragged through as many references and disciplines as your average Girl Talk track. The obvious precursor is Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor, with its frenzied paranoid style and madness as a contagion theme. But there’s also Val Lewton hanging around with the all consuming carnivorous shadows and the buried secrets in the past eroding the present. In the extreme imagery in dream sequences that make up so much of the movies meat its possible to feel the dark operatic tones of Chan Wook Park. There’s even a touch of Gialli here, albeit more Mario Bava then Lucio Fulci. But I think that the key to the movie is the one that Scorsese gave to us at BNAT, by insisting that The Red Shoes play before it. The fact that Scorsese is a Powell disciple is no secret, but I don’t know if its ever been clearer then here.

Powell’s was a cinema of dreams. More so I think then any other director. Yes more so then Fellini, Cocteau, Lynch, Gilliam, and all the rest. This might strike some as odd if only for the fact that most of Powell’s films are fairly straight forward on a narrative level. Break them down to their base components and they seem down right unremarkable, the story of the feuds in a ballet company, a film following the carrier of a dedicated military man, horny nuns in the Himalya’s. But watching his films is a completely different experience, sensual, overpowering, and occasionally nightmarish. Powell understood the ways in which dreams and cinema line up, the way both subliminally code through imagery and constant repetition, how both hinge on something ineffable, the way both can turn on you on a dime and suddenly sink their teeth into your neck. Think the expressionistic sets in Tales Of Hoffman, think of the horrifying climax (the whole thing really) in Black Narcissus and think lastly of that last horrible, inevitable piece of dream logic that Powell deployed like an A Bomb in The Red Shoes.

Shutter Island is a film that operates on that level. Its horrific in an indefinable way. A film that takes your subconscious and gnaws on it until its bloody.

But of course under all the influence and juxtaposition, the only person a Scorsese movie belongs to is Scorsese. His films often deal with morality and ethics, and if you look at it from this angle Shutter Island fits in neatly with the rest of Scorsese’s oeuvre. How much responsibility can you take for actions that are not entirely your own anymore? Shutter Island is an existential thriller. Its like Camus collaborated with Hitchcock. I am reminded of Joe Hill’s great passage in Heart Shaped Box that noted that “Its not houses that are haunted but minds.”

He assembles a dream team here. DiCaprio using his natural callowness to his advantage, Mark Ruffalo making an excellent straight man, grounding all the crazy. Ben Kingsley actually seems to be giving a shit for the first time since Sexy Beast, a sight so foregein that it took me a minute to recognize it. Max Von Sydow shows no ill effects from the vast amount of sodium penathol that Brett Ratner pumped into him when he kidnapped him and held his children at gunpoint to star in Rush Hour 3 (That’s what I tell myself happened anyway. Because the alternative is that Max Von Sydow agreed to be in Rush Hour 3) . He’s having the most fun in the movie hiding behind thick coke bottle glasses and a sinister German accent, and when he posits late in the film syringe hidden behind his back “Ven you See va Monsta vou must destroooy it!” well its kind of amazing.

Jackie Earle Haley and Ted Levine both do what they do best, name act like terrifyingly convincing nutjobs as does Elias Koteas, although his make up looks so distractingly like Robert De Niro’s in Frankenstein, that for a few confused seconds I thought it was De Niro, and was disappointed when I realized Scorsese hadn’t kept an amazing cameo hidden. Patricia Clarkson and Emily Mortimer both do strong work in what amounts to cameos, and Michelle Williams is kind of stunning and fragile, in the role that ends up becoming the dark heart of the picture.



Stylistically this film is top notch as well. I love it when Scorsese shoots with Robert Richardson (Who between this and Inglorious Basterds is having one hell of a year) and the fact that they get to collaborate makes me excited for Hugo Cabearet (even if I am disappointed Silence is getting pushed back again). There’s something in Richardson that brings out the daring side in Scorsese. The three films they’ve made together so far, this, The Aviator, and Bringing Out The Dead showcase Scorsese at his most extreme in terms of imagery. He sets himself up with some pretty challenging motifs here, people bursting into ash, pools of water and blood spreading, the dead bodies of the innocent. Not since Friedkin made the central image of To Live And Die In LA that of people being shot in the face has a major filmmaker in a mainstream movie made such relentlessly unpleasant imagery so front and center to his film. And yet far from being overwhelmed Scorsese makes these images harrowingly beautiful.


Shutter Island is not a safe film. Its not here to tell you everything is OK. Its here to take a piece out of you. And brother its gonna.

Roger Ebert Esquire

If you haven't read Esquires profile of Ebert, you owe it to yourself to do so. A moving portrait of dignity and intellect surviving the worst possible circumstances.


Ebert is so good we tend to take him for granted. I would probably still love film if it where not for Roger Ebert, but I don't know if I would do it half so well.

Cape Fear

I’m going to teach you about loss

-Max Cady-

The excellent Shutter Island is coming out this weekend, so I thought it the perfect time to revist Scorsese’s other toe dip into the Horror genre, Cape Fear.

Cape Fear is probably the least loved Scorsese movie. Scorsese is, as I’ve mentioned, my favorite filmmaker. I maintain that there is no such thing as a bad Scorsese film. But while New York New York and King Of Comedy have plenty of followers thanks to their status as a clusterfucks, and his other movies that people deem too mainstream The Departed, The Color Of Money and The Aviator are, well frankly much better films, Cape Fear just gets left out in the cold, with precious few defenders. Perhaps it is more appropriate to call Cape Fear Scorsese’s least essential film.

Cape Fear is just an odd movie. An unabashedly mainstream thriller cum melodrama slash horror film, that is underlined by an edge that is frankly perverse. If there’s a film more steeped in psychosexual imagery and violence to play in the cineplex, outside of The DePalma canon it does not spring directly to mind. I mean hell the dog’s not even safe.

But it’s precisely that oddity of Cape Fear that I find so compelling. It’s a film made nearly hypnotic by the things it does right and wrong.

First lets get the wrong out of the way. It’s a film plagued by miscasting, first with Nick Nolte straightjacketed in the role of the straightlaced lawyer who has the wrath of God come down upon him. Nick Nolte is a fine actor but one thing he does not project is straightforward stability. It feels like every scene begins with him hiding a bottle just out of frame. Furthering the problem is Juliet Lewis, who as you might remember, I hate with the passion of a thousand suns. Its no exaggeration to say she’s my least favorite actress, and every moment she spends on screen is a moment where I am wincing. Furthermore, it is the only Scorsese movie that I would argue feels dated. It keeps doing this thing where it flashes to pointless, negative images that screams “Madonna Video in 1991”.



Still that last problem hints at one of the movies strengths. One of the things that I love about Scorsese is the way he uses his “minor” films to conduct his greatest experiments (“Can I make this shot a Teddy Bear propped up in a chair ominous?” you can hear him asking) Scorsese even gives a nod to himself “selling out” while simotanously drawing a clear line between his true investment in the project and Hollywood Pablum by setting an early scene in a theater showing that paragon of cinema Problem Child. Following one of his clumsy negative shots of Nolte and Jessica Lange (in fine form) doing the horizontal mambo, Scorsese showcases a startling Montage of an unsatisfied Lange in fixing her makeup in close up, intercut with startling fades to primary colors. The scene which moments before seemed faintly ridiculous takes on a Hitchcockian level of sexuality mixed with primal unease.



But then afterwards we cut to Robert DeNiro in front of bad CGI fireworks in an obvious Green screen. It’s Cape Fear in a nutshell, from the ridiculous to the sublime to the ridiculous again.

Robert De Niro embraces the spirit fully. Remember this is back when De Niro was still the guy who flung himself head first into everything rather then the guy who made you hold your head in hands wondering what the fuck happened. While Robert Mitchum played Cady like the worst possible scenario for redneckism, a lizard eyed dead souled cretin, De Niro goes the opposite way. Investing Cady with a mix of backwoods transcendentalism and Nietzschian . Scorsese plays right into it, framing De Niro’s rippling muscles covered in totemistic tattoos, making Cady such a powerful figure that he can even walk through the screen.



He's someone who can take a face full of boiling water and melted wax over his hand without flinching (One of my favorite lines in the film, “Grandaddy was a snake handler and Grandma drank Strychnine”). He’s so intimidating in the role that he gives Robert Freaking Mitchum pause (Another pleasure of the movie, it gives Old Hollywood fan Scorsese a chance to work with such true old school icons as Peck and Mitchum. For the first time since John Carradine in Boxcar Bertha if I recall correctly. He gets great performances from both. Particularly Mitchum as a cop none too concerned about the letter of the law. Peck is great, playing against his persona as a sanctimonious bastard.) Joe Don Baker also does a freaking tremendous job (You haven’t heard Thus Spoke Zathurstra until you’ve heard Baker pronounce it).

The best move Scorsese makes is making Cady smart (In one of his best scense De Niro brags that he can “Out Philosophize” Nolte). When Nolte offers him a pay off of ten thousand dollars (and remember these are nineteen ninety one dollars) Cady breaks down the amount showing what a pittance it really is, with a skill that surprises both Nolte and the audience. As mentioned the threat of Cady is sexual as well as physical. The fact that he was in prison for Rape is constant motif, the clear implication that he doesn’t want to take away Nolte’s wife and child through violence alone, he wants to taint them.

In a way Cady becomes for Scorsese, a perverse nighmare version of Ethan Edwards, Ford’s famous protaginist in The Searchers. In Scorsese’s tremendous video essay, A Personal Journey Through American Cinema, he mentions that for Edwards, “The Physical Death Of The Indian isn’t enough”. Likewise Cady turns away from the chance to merely kill Nolte several times (most pointedly during the scene in which Nolte’s hired goons fail to take Cady down). Cady is the intellect tainted, physical pain, physical death isn’t enough. Bowden must suffer mental and more importantly for Scorsese; spiritual, anguish.

For Cady sleeping with a woman is roughly the same thing as a dog marking his territory. And the two sequences, that are the films most famous, and not coincidentally its most sickeningly resonant are Cady’s seduction of Lewis and his seduction, rape and mutilation of the woman Nolte has been having an affair with (played by the great Illiana Douglas).

The scene of the actual assault is horrific, vile; maybe the one sequence in Scorsese’s oeuvre that can truly be called gratuitous (aside from the head in the vice in Casino). But the scene leading up to it is masterful, perhaps the greatest example of Hitchcock’s bomb under the table, I’ve ever seen. Trying to get over Nolte Douglas is drunk in a bar, flirting with Cady, who is doing absolutely nothing threatening. By the time we cut to them in bed together with Douglas drunkenly excited (with an all too real mixture of amusement, incredulity and genuine arousal) by the bondage Cady’s engaging her in. We know its going to be bad. We have no idea how bad. Its one of the most sickening scenes of Scorsese’s career. Its not a trivial. Greer and what she goes through are given full consideration. It’d be unfair to call Cape Fear a misogynistic film. That doesn’t make it any easier to watch.

In a way Cape Fear climaxes with this scene. Afterwards Scorsese swings wildly into farce. Particularly in the “trial” scene in which a now burned Cady and Bowden argue to an invisible “judge” that at once breaks the fourth wall and becomes a Bergmanesque induction of God. While the scene is effective and thematically consistent with Scorsese’s oeuvre, that doesn’t change the fact that it is also faintly ridiculous. The rest of the movie is a mixture of Eyes Wide Shut (With Cady tearing the nuclear family apart rather then strengthening it the way normal Spielberg produced film would) and Nightmare On Elm Street (With Cady jumping up like a Jack In The Box, infamously hanging himself under Bowden’s car and the film expecting us to believe that De Niro would make an effective drag queen.) Although it does pull it all together for the climax. When Cady sinks down speaking in tongues its hard not to feel some measure of awe if only for De Niro’s and Cady's utter commitment.

Cape Fear remains a troubling film, in more ways then one. Most dismiss it as little more then a detour in Scorsese’s career. And to a certain extent their right. But it’s a detour that reveals some great truths about Scorsese as an artist. Cape Fear proves that even when he’s making a mainstream summer blockbuster, Scorsese cannot help but be irrepressibly himself.