So yesterday I was scrambling around getting ready to shoot a short film and then I was too busy actually shooting to recommend a film so today is another double feature to make up for it.
The first film I am recommending today is the 1962 classic thriller Cape Fear. I feel that this version (the original) is overlooked by many people due to the fact that Scorsese remade the film several years later which is a shame because I feel that the first film is leaps and bounds better than the remake.
The major difference between these films is the subtlety that the director used. Subtlety may not seem that important but in this particular narrative, subtlety is everything. The story follows a lawyer (Gregory Peck) who, along with his family, is being stalked by a man he helped put in jail (Robert Mitchum). What is important in the film is the way that the man stalks the family, in that he does it in ways that on the surface aren't illegal. He simply just starts appearing wherever they are. Robert Mitchum is hauntingly calm in his maniacal plan to torture the family, something that was missing from Robert De Niro's portrayal of the same role.
Something that I also really enjoyed about the film was that we actually got to see the action in it. The camera hardly moves during fight scenes and the cutting isn't too quick to where we can't see anything (something that occurs far too much in today's films). Thompson relied on his character development to create tension so he didn't have to do any "tricks" to make us feel more during these scenes, instead he slowly built to them and allowed us to watch them.
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