de niro vs. mitchum
Why I liked the original better: Robert de Niro ACTED scary, Robert Mitchum WAS scary. Makes all the difference in the world.
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I seem to remember a documentary about Mitchum in which Gregory Peck told how he asked Mitchum to play the part of Max Cady and Mitchum said no, he'd have to find someone else. So Peck said, okay Bob, help me out here, try to think about someone who can play it as well as you can. And Mitchum thought for about fifteen seconds and then said, all right, I'll do it.
Then later on Polly Bergen (who played Peck's wife) told the interviewer about the scene where Mitchum was harassing her in the boat, and it seems that Mitchum suddenly crossed the line between acting and being, and he really pushed her around and grabbed her arms so tight that she ended up with several bruises - he actually scared her. Afterwards he apologized profusely to her, but what you see in this scene is not an actor playing a scene but a man entering the darkness in himself and coming up with, well, not a performance but an actual piece of brutality.
Perhaps that is why Mitchum did not want to do the part. Maybe he just was not interested in another Night of the hunter-psycho-baddie, but then again maybe he knew what lurked inside himself and he was afraid of giving it a free rein.
Whatever the reason, Mitchum played it down to earth while De Niro went over the top on this one. Which can be fun, but is also more theatrical and (in this instance) less effective.
I'll take Mitchum for a thousand.
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De Niro had an impossible task, and I don't really know why he accepted it. Gutsy, perhaps, but the whole thing was prgrammed for failure. Certainly he realized that he couldn't do what Mitchum did -- no one could. I watch the performance and still don't quite understand how he so fully personifies this slack, unhurried evil. The performance is rightly a recognized classic. No other character in a film has ever made my skin crawl the way Mitchum's does. So De Niro took a different route, as he had to. In some scenes, it's pretty darn effective. But the best he or anyone else could hope for was second best. And the fact that he's trying too hard shows through in some scenes. Some movies simply don't need to be re-made. I don't care how good an actor is, no one is going to better Bogart in The Maltese Falcon or or Gary Cooper in High Noon, or Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear.
shareIt was not necessary for a remake, but since it was made, it was actually quite good. It was enjoyable though over-the-top in some ways. The remake had more sub-plots but fortunately didn't overshadow the main plot.
shareI agree with those who think Mitchum gave the better performance. He was truly creepy, and Mitchum's scenes with the young daughter were actually much more shocking because she seemed so much younger than Juliette Lewis, who played the daughter in the remake. That scene where Lewis was sucking DeNiro's thumb didn't make her seem all that innocent and vulnerable. I thought Polly Bergen did a fair job as Gregory Peck's wife, too.
Robert DeNiro is a great actor, I'm sure most of us agree about that...but Robert Mitchum was truly fierce in "Cape Fear", while DeNiro was way over the top.