On April 12, 1962, the film based on the novel by John D. MacDonald with Gregory Peck as protagonist was released in American cinemas.
On April 12, 1962, it was released in American cinemas “The promontory of fear” (Cape Fear) by J. Lee Thompson (for an Italian distribution it will be necessary to wait until October); a full-blown noir based on the novel of the same name by the prolific crime writer John D. MacDonald and entrusted to the British director J. Lee Thompson who up to that moment had made a name for himself at home with films with a moderate commercial success and that only once (with Ice-cold beer in Alexandria – Desperate Patrol, 1958) had seen his work internationally recognized with a FIPRESCI award at the Berlin Film Festival.
The promontory of fear is his second productionand entirely American after The Cannons of Navarone (1961), a wartime blockbuster for one hundred and sixty minutes in which he had fully unleashed both his characteristics as a robust narrator and the ability to effectively govern large casts. Struggling with an infinitely smaller film in terms of production than the previous one (which also included David Niven, Anthony Quinn, Stanley Baker, Anthony Quayle and Irene Papas), Lee Thompson finds its protagonist Gregory Peck (also co-producer) and collaborates for the first time (two more will follow: The lady and her husbands, 1964, and The warriors of the wind, 1984) with Robert Mitchum, called once again after Death runs up the river to embody a sort of metaphor of Evil with the his relentless and vengeful ex-con Max Cady.
After serving eight years in prison for beatings, Max Cady approaches lawyer Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck), a key witness to his conviction, and the lawyer quickly realizes that the man is animated by a feeling of revenge towards him. He thus tries to protect his wife Peggy (Polly Bergen) and young daughter Nancy (Lori Martin) by asking for help from his friend inspector Mark Dutton (Martin Balsam) who despite trying by all legal means to be able to arrest him again must surrender to the evidence and to the cunning of the man (again guilty of violence against a girl but without having been reported) who apparently does not violate any law with his intimidating behavior.
Thus began a nightmare of constant tension for the family; and although Dutton has ordered the surveillance of the Bowdens and also intensified the police checks on Cady, he first manages to poison the lawyer’s dog and then to approach his daughter as he leaves the school. Determined to solve the problem by obtaining summary justice, Bowden is persuaded to desist by his wife and ends up proposing to the man the payment of a large sum of money as long as he leaves them alone. When Cady does not declare himself interested in the money, Bowden makes the mistake of taking private detective Charles Sievers (Telly Savalas), hired to tail the ex-convict, at his word, and commissions some dockers to do a “job” to ensure that the man no longer disturbs his family. But the attempt turns out to be unsuccessful: because Cady not only manages to survive the attack, but warns Bowden to be aware of his identity as principal, declaring his career as a lawyer over. Sam decides to play one last card and again with the complicity of Dutton tries to set a trap for Cady. Pretending to leave, he lets him believe that he has left his wife and daughter alone in a houseboat they own moored on a river; but when Cady arrives in the area and realizes that the house is guarded by the county deputy, he has no qualms about eliminating it and then mooring up and heading out on the river with Peggy. Having managed to get on board, Bowden prepares for the final confrontation with Cody once his daughter is safe, the real target of the deranged; but despite the opportunity presented to him to kill him in self-defense, he will decide to let him live, trusting in a new sentence after another trial.
Although very effective in its almost b-movie size for a certain roughness of staging, for Bernard Herrmann’s memorable soundtrack, for the sharp photography of Sam Leavitt (who a few years earlier came close to the Oscar for Anatomy of a murder by Preminger) and for the strange alchemy between the two stars (which initially would have had to exchange roles if Peck had not opposed yet another villain role in production), The promontory of fear would have perhaps ended up being almost forgotten and certainly counted among the most Manichean examples of the genre ( “James Webb’s screenplay […] describes Bergen and Martin, wife and daughter, and Peck himself as bourgeois so respectable that one would want to side with Cady “- P. Mereghetti) if in 1991 Martin Scorsese had not decided to make a makeover almost on commission: Cape Fear – Il promontory of fear.
The new version, with Robert De Niro/ Cady and Nick Nolte / Bowden, in fact basically kept the narrative skeleton (except for the fate of Cady, who in the new version dies exactly as in the novel) but brought to the extreme symbolic consequences what in the original is deducible but left in a nutshell: transforming the story into a metaphor discovered of the crisis of the “capitalist” family as well as the character of the persecutor in the dark side of that same well-being society that he decides to oppress even though he is aware of not being able to win the game.
In this perspective of dialogue between the two works (which Scorsese wanted to keep by recalling the elderly Peck and Mitchum in the cast, assigning them in his version of the mockingly antipodal roles: the first is a policeman, the second is none other than Cady’s defense lawyer), while the vision “of problematic and breathtaking author of the remake, the direct ancestry of both (aware for Scorsese, contingent for J. Lee Thompson) is grafted by force on a single matrix: the aforementioned Death runs on the river, a masterpiece and the only direction by Charles Laughton. With the character of the murderous preacher Harry Powell spreading like a long shadow of meaning both on the motivations and on the less emphasized personification of Evil of the first Max Cody and on the more radical and exhibited one of the second.
April 12, 2022 (change April 12, 2022 | 14:54)
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