TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111191/1111520.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.3 KB | 201 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 84

Filming At Full Throttle


Goodfella MARTIN SCORSESE, with his seductive feel for
psychotics, shows again in Cape Fear why he is America's premier
picturemaker

By RICHARD CORLISS


    From the window of Martin Scorsese's apartment on the
75th floor of a slim midtown skyscraper, Manhattan seems a
pretty little thing. Central Park is a toy football field, and
the swaying trees a sea of pompoms at half time. In the
apartment's foyer, a poster for the furtive Italian classic
Ossessione -- good title for nearly any Scorsese project --
auditions you. An old horror film flickers on a projector screen
the size of Charles Foster Kane's fireplace. This is where and
how God would live if he loved movies.

    But is it the right place for Scorsese? His best films --
Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, the new
Cape Fear -- live at gutter and gut level. Maybe Steven
Spielberg, whose films are aspirations to altitude, deserves to
live this high up. In fact, he keeps a facing apartment at the
top of another steel stalk a few blocks away. When Scorsese
moved here three years ago, Spielberg gave his friend a
telescope so that movieland's two most gifted directors could
keep an eye on each other. Spielberg may as well have presented
him with Patriot missile parts, assembly required. "Steve's the
whiz at technical stuff," says Scorsese, 48, who will soon move
into a town house, closer to ground zero of the twisted city he
loves. "I could never get the thing to work."

    Martin Scorsese, the klutz who can get the movie thing to
work like no other American filmmaker. Scorsese, the frail,
asthmatic fellow whose protagonists arc toward psychop athy, or
else start there and keep going. Scorsese, the ex-seminarian
whose volcanic film style regularly drives the ratings sentinels
bats. Scorsese, the child of Manhattan's Little Italy who today
can't watch parts of Raging Bull: "Too upsetting." Scorsese, the
four-times-married gent (including to Isabella Rossellini and
Barbara De Fina, producer of Cape Fear) whose films are mostly
about men in killer conflict. The man embraces multitudes of
contradictions. He is also one of the few reasons not to be
depressed about current movies.

    Yet whether you love his films or hate them -- and to hate
them you probably have to be insensitive to the seductive power
of movie craft at full throttle -- they are of a piece, easy to
spot. Start (in seven of Scorsese's 16 features) with Robert De
Niro, the director's onscreen sales rep, reeking menace, ready
to pose for a portrait of American evil. Introduce a second
character, an audience surrogate, intoxicated by the De Niro
magnetism but cramped by conscience. Put them, and a couple
dozen other vultures and victims, on the street. Add a knowing
rock-'n'-roll sound track, a hurtling camera that always knows
where to be and an editing strategy (executed by the brilliant
Thelma Schoonmaker) that shaves scenes to the bone and keeps the
viewer nicely off kilter.

    Scorsese's style reconciles art-house finesse with B-movie
excess. And when it finds a subject to match, the result is a
Taxi Driver -- brazen, desperate, indelible -- or a Raging Bull,
which critics' polls called the best movie of the '80s. Cape
Fear, while not a project Scorsese originated, has the same
preoccupations, the same verve. When one reviewer ticks off the
movie's themes, the auteur shrugs and says, "Yeah, sure. Guilt,
obsession. All the old stuff. All my old friends."

    It's true: the gang's all here. O.K., Scorsese had to be
dragged kicking and equivocating into the movie; De Niro kept
cajoling the director, and Spielberg, whose Amblin Entertainment
produced the film, kept encouraging him to try a mainstream
thriller. Even during shooting he seemed defensive. "This is
only a remake," Scorsese said on the set in Florida, "an
extension of the themes in the 1962 original. Look at this scene
we're doing: man picks up rock, hits bad guy." But by now, as
he fine-tunes Cape Fear for release next week, it is uniquely
Scorsese's picture -- he couldn't sell out if he wanted to. The
film is violent, excessive and, above all, entertaining; it
anticipates, satisfies and then trumps the moviegoer's
expectations. It plunders film history (The Night of the Hunter,
Psycho, even Spielberg's shooting stars) and creates, in De
Niro's character, a loner driven to impossible extremes by the
voices inside him. He is brother to Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle
and Raging Bull's Jake La Motta, and evil twin to Jesus in
Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ.

    In this remake of the 1962 sicko classic based on John D.
MacDonald's novel The Executioners, the plot contours are the
same: a sleazy ex-con, Max Cady, comes to a small Southern town
to take his slow revenge on a lawyer who sent him to jail, and
on the lawyer's vulnerable family. The basic ethical tangle
remains as well: How can a good liberal fight a bad man who at
first may do nothing but lurk? But now everything else is more
intense, more complex. From the film's first images -- weird
creatures shimmering just below sea level like monsters of the
id, De Niro's eyes burning through the screen -- Cape Fear has
been Bobbyized and Martyized.

    In the 1962 Cape Fear, written by James R. Webb and
directed by J. Lee Thompson, Robert Mitchum played Cady, and
much of the movie's repellent jolt came from his look and bulk.
Lounging on a street corner with his X-rated face, smirking at
the fragile innocence of the lawyer's young daughter, he was a
case study of "lewd vagrancy." Leaning his bare-barrel torso
into a cringing Polly Bergen (the lawyer's wife), cracking a raw
egg in the air and then wiping the semen-like yolk from her
shoulders and breasts, caressing her, undressing her with his
syrupy threats, slapping her when she can't stop wailing, he was
as lurid a demon of predatory sensuality as Hollywood then dared
imagine.

    Mitchum was two things De Niro isn't: big and sexy. De
Niro's Cady, though, has the cunning of madness. His body
tattooed with Old Testament threats, he is a sleek machine of
vengeance. He even has some reason for his rank righteousness.
Unlike the 1962 film's lawyer (Gregory Peck), who had simply
been the witness to Cady's criminal activity, this Sam Bowden
(Nick Nolte) was once Cady's lawyer, and he has plenty to hide.
Sam, his wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) and their daughter Danny
(Juliette Lewis) are no ideal family. But they are ideal marks
for Cady. He is pure, they are confused. He is obsessed, they
are demoralized. He is guilty, they are guilt-ridden. Whispering
into the ear of Sam's secrets, Leigh's suspicions and Danny's
adolescent defiance, Max is the guilty conscience in every
decent person.

    "When I read Wesley Strick's script," Scorsese says, "I
loved Max and hated the family -- because Max moved and they
just sat there. When Wesley and I got together, I said, `I
apologize for what's about to happen to you.' We stripped the
script down and built it up. Now the family is in a lot of pain.
They don't trust each other. Sam has had an affair whose wounds
-- his wife's, his child's, his own -- he's trying to lick and
live down. Going in, he's guilty, poor guy. Leigh is watching
life ebb away as she nears middle age; things are bad, and
they're going to get worse. And Danny despises them both. She
needs to break out from them, no matter what danger she might
break into. They all need a trauma that will either bind them
together or completely tear them apart. So we ran all these
changes on the `good' family. And now that they're imperfect,
I love every one of them."

    With equal and less complicated affection, Scorsese
remembers his own extended Little Italy family -- his parents'
brothers and sisters and their kids, 30 or 40 in all, gathered
for holiday festas on Elizabeth Street. It was a neighborhood
where the "good" people and the "bad" mingled a lot more easily
than the Bowdens do with Max. "Some directors," Scorsese says,
"romanticize Italian-American gangsters. First of all, where we
lived there were no gangs, no Jets and Sharks; that was beneath
us. Second, there was no big difference between people who went
into `certain circles' and the rest of us. There were the guys
who went off to college, the blue-collar guys and the other
group, the ones who had the calling. And I shuttled among all
three."

    Throughout his youth, Scorsese thought he had a calling
too. The future director of The Last Temptation of Christ
yearned to be a priest. But another vocation beckoned. Charles
and Catherine Scorsese, who today make occasional endearing
cameo appearances in their son's films, took young Marty to the
movies, and it was ossessione at first sight. He talks of old
movies as a caliph might of all his beautiful women. So many
films, so much informed love. "Watching Land of the Pharaohs as
a kid, I felt I was in ancient Egypt," he recalls. "And I've
been obsessed with CinemaScope since I saw The Robe at the Roxy
in 1953." (Cape Fear is his first wide-screen film.) In the '70s
he was one of several directors asked by a film magazine for a
list of old movies that might be designated as "guilty
pleasures" -- orphan films he loved. Everyone else chose 10;
Scorsese came up with 125, and he wasn't even winded.

    "When someone compliments me on my movies," Scorsese says,
"I tell them, `Thank you, but I bet I've seen more movies than
you have, and I know what's really good. I know what I'm up
against." Fair enough. But his contemporaries are up against
something equally formidable: the Scorsese canon. Cape Fear is
a worthy addition to it; the new film meets the challenge of
starting at fever pitch and then ascending to a climax that
plays like a hurricane of hysteria.

    Young Marty, mature Scorsese. The dreamy boy has put his
nightmares and memories on film. Those old friends swaggering
past Umbertos Clam House have been alchemized into tragicomic
De Niros. And -- let's have a happy ending for one Scorsese
picture -- the little lad from the mean streets has scaled the
heights. Not just to a luxe Manhattan aerie but into the realm
where almost no contemporary filmmaker can touch him. Made it,
Ma, top of the world.