[In the following review of Cape Fear, Kauffmann notes the film's strengths and weaknesses and questions why Scorsese chose to lend his talents to such slight, formulaic material.]

It's not quite right to say that Martin Scorsese has remade Cape Fear. This is no more a mere remake of the 1962 film than John Huston's The Maltese Falcon was a remake of two earlier versions. Scorsese's film is as original as it could be in the circumstances. (Admittedly, I'm comparing out of memory: I don't think I could sit through the J. Lee Thompson version again, especially after this new one.)

Scorsese hasn't been notable for his radical subject matter, but his career certainly isn't a series of pigeonholes. Then why, just as he is arching out in reputation and power, did he choose to make a genre thriller? The buzz in the film world is that he was paying a debt to Universal. He was planning, and will now do, a film of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, an especially tantalizing idea since the book is so far from the usual haunts of this vivid and (in two senses) vulgar director. But Universal had backed a project that was dear to him, The Last Temptation of Christ, so when the studio proposed this remake, he felt obliged. Well, at least this thriller gives us some conventional fare to munch on while the gourmet dish is being prepared.

The new screenplay—based on the earlier one by James R. Webb and the novel by John D. MacDonald—was written by Wesley Strick, author of the neat thriller True Believer a few years back. With Scorsese's help, Strick has recast the characters, trying to dump the stodge and add some glints of verity.

The setting is the South; Cape Fear is the name of a river in North Carolina. The basic drive is a convict's quest for vengeance, after his release, on the person he holds responsible for his fourteen-year prison term. The convict is a psychopathic rapist-batterer. He wants revenge on the lawyer—now a successful man with a wife and 15-year-old daughter—who was once his defender. (Not the prosecutor.) The Strick-Scorsese twist is that this lawyer is not the Joe Honesty he was in the 1962 version. At the trial the lawyer deliberately withheld evidence that would have helped his client because he thought the man ought to be convicted. The con has subsequently found that out. After his release, he also finds out that the lawyer is fooling around with another woman.

The ex-con is a Georgia cracker, his torso tattooed with Bible quotations and a huge cross. Robert De Niro plays—inhabits—the role, and after Glimpse One, we know that we are in for an actor's holiday. This is not remotely to say that he is less than good: but it's the kind of part that, for any actor of talent, let alone De Niro's talent, almost acts itself. Everything in the film is slanted to make De Niro's performance stand out, and it does. It's like Anthony Hopkins's homicidal genius in The Silence of the Lambs gone hillbilly and Pentecostal.

The ex-con begins slow. He does nothing illegal. He just makes his presence known to the lawyer, constantly. The lawyer—Nick Nolte, bespectacled and serious—applies for a restraining order. This doesn't help. We share Nolte's frustration and rising panic. We know things are going to get worse. Bloody. We can't wait.

Strick's script, adequately written throughout, peaks in a quasi-seduction scene between De Niro and the lawyer's young daughter. (Reminiscent of the long scene between Treat Williams and Laura Dern in Smooth Talk.) But like virtually all thriller scripts, this one uses realism only as a launchpad into the incredible. Let's concede that De Niro, absolutely illiterate when he went to prison, could come out conversant with law, Nietzsche, and Henry Miller. But Nolte blurts out threats to De Niro that all of us except Nolte—a lawyer!—know are being recorded. There are encounters in Nolte's home and on a houseboat that have nothing to do with believability. By that time we are at the place where a thriller says, "OK, we've been realistic up to now, to get your attention. Now all aboard for Movieland."

Jessica Lange plays Nolte's wife and does fairly well with a part that is doomed to some dullness. No matter how she and Scorsese and Strick try to alter the role, she ends up as one more wide-eyed female victim waiting for male rescue. The best performance after De Niro's, in the meatiest role after his, comes from Juliette Lewis as the daughter. Plenty of children and adolescents can mimic well; a few can act. Lewis, who has done films and TV, is one of them. No doubt Scorsese had a considerable hand in leading her through her experience and imagination to the troubled, subtly shaded candor of her performance; but she made it. Lewis's discoveries of self in the role are exceptional.

Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, and Martin Balsam, all of whom were prominent in the first Cape Fear, play minor roles here. Pleasant souvenirs. The original score by Bernard Herrmann has been reworked by Elmer Bernstein and does its job well, especially in keeping the film suspenseful during quieter moments.

But the film is Scorsese, more and less. With Freddie Francis (who did Glory) as cinematographer, Scorsese uses Panavision for the first time and is thoroughly easy with it, exploiting its reach, never straining to fill the frame. With his customary editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese slams the picture into action and keeps it there. He finds ways to jog the expected shot into freshness. When the girl gets a cajoling call from the excon, we cut to De Niro, who, instead of snuggling cozily on the phone, is hanging upside down on an exercise bar, flexing his leg muscles as he phones. At bottom Scorsese keeps scenes boiling by intensifying pressure on his actors; but camera sharpness and knife-edge editing carry the pressure through.

Some of his devices obtrude, even as they work. Several times he has a character walk right into the camera to black out a shot, as a way of cutting to the next shot. Very often he begins a new scene with a loud sound. (Something like the way he used pop songs in GoodFellas.) A few devices not only obtrude but don't work, like the use of X-ray shots. Possibly they're meant to suggest hidden fear that is then fleshed; but they're only distracting.

What it all comes to is that Scorsese has spent his considerable talent trying to make a Scorsese film out of a formula. (The Desperate Hours, The Petrified Forest … a long, long line of plays and films about ordinary folks at the mercy of criminals.) He doesn't quite succeed: the formulaic load is too heavy. Next, however, Edith Wharton. With Wharton, perhaps, he'll make us change our idea of what a Scorsese film is.