He’s Out Now: ‘Cape Fear’ (1962)
By: Lary Wallace
Tags: Film, Robert Mitchum, Cape Fear, Movies

Sometimes you find poetry on a map. That’s what Peck discovered when he traced his finger up the East Coast of the United States looking for his terrain of terror. Sure enough, there it was, in the state of North Carolina: Cape Fear River. Suddenly his movie had a name.

And in Alfred Hitchcock, the movie had something of a father figure. Although “Thompson did not set out to deliberately evoke Hitchcock,” according to the wonderful resource Alfred Hitch-blog, Cape Fear does feature

an editor, music composer, two art directors, a leading actor and a supporting actor who were all associated with Hitchcock, so it is hard to avoid comparison. It is not a true Hitchcock movie in theme or in style, although in camera movements, in economy of shots, in the tightness of the editing, in the evocative score of Bernard Herrmann, it is very Hitchcockian indeed.

We hear the music of Herrmann before we even see the movie — it jumps in during the studio identification — and it’s as jarring as ever, insistently proclaiming the terrifying nature of what we’re about to witness, its “dissonant string combinations,” in the words of Herrmann’s biographer, “suggest[ing] the workings of a killer’s mind” — which is important, since the movie is an hour and 28 minutes old before our man kills anything other than a dog.

The editor referred to above is George Tomasini — veteran of all Hitch’s very best films — who had an uncanny knack for rendering Thompson’s own vision. His sense of suspense and pacing ran like a language through his subconscious, all habit and instinct by this point. Once Tomasini had made the main cut, Thompson would come in and refine what he’d done until it conformed precisely with his expectations. Theirs was a wonderful professional partnership, of the kind we all wish we could have more of.

Martin Balsam was a Psycho (1960) alum favored by Thompson, who after interviewing him “knew that he was absolutely right for the part.” Robert F. Boyle was a set designer who had worked on at least four Hitchcock films, and will forever have the distinction of being the man who re-created Mount Rushmore for North by Northwest (1959), when the production was denied permission to shoot there. Cape Fear’s other art director, Alexander Golitzen, meanwhile, had won an Oscar for his work on Hitch’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). Hell, even Gregory Peck his own self had worked with Hitchcock, starring in Spellbound (1945) and The Paradine Case (1947).

Having worked as Hitchcock’s dialogue coach on Jamaica Inn (1939), Thompson remembered, “I saw the great master at work….[I]t is one of my precious memories that I saw him closely…at work. He had everything plotted down to the last detail.” On another occasion, Thompson said that he stood “in awe of Hitchcock,” and admitted that “when I come to a scene, I can’t help but wonder how Hitchcock would do it,” observing further one of the not-so-secret recipes of the Master of Suspense: “Hitchcock…liked to let the audience know, and [for] the person on the screen not to know.”

This last element is of course one of the great sources of Cape Fear’s appeal, because for all of the Bowdens’ uncertainty, we sit in cozy comfort knowing that the the killer has not gone away, and that something, ultimately, is going to have to give. Who among us, sickened by the saccharine sanctimony of Peck’s Atticus Finch in Mockingbird, doesn’t glow just a little inside as Bowden — Peck now playing another dear-old-daddy lawyer — sits his family down and says, “Eight years ago I was a witness against a man and he was sent to prison, and the thing is, he’s out now, and blames me for his conviction.”