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Superior to Martin Scorsese's punishing 1991 remake, this 1962 thriller directed by J. Lee Thompson (
The Guns of Navarone) stars Robert Mitchum as a creepy ex-con angry at the attorney (Gregory Peck) whom he believes is responsible for his incarceration. After Mitchum makes clear his plans to harm Peck's family, a fascinating game of crisscrossing ethics and morality takes place. Where the more recent version seemed trapped in its explicitness, Thompson's film accomplishes a lot with a more economical and telling use of violence. The result is a richer character study with some Hitchcockian overtones regarding the nature of guilt.
--Tom Keogh
From The New Yorker
Martin Scorsese's new film is a remake of a bluntly effective 1962 thriller about a middle-class family-husband, wife, teen-age daughter-who are terrorized by a devious, implacable psychopath. The original (which was based on a pulp novel by John D. MacDonald and directed by J. Lee Thompson) had the straight-ahead construction of a horror movie, and it never pretended that what it was doing was good for us. The remake muddies the waters with self-consciousness: Scorsese and the screenwriter, Wesley Strick, have loaded the movie with apparent moral ambiguities, facile ideas about guilt and redemption, and explicit attempts to portray the scuzzy villain as a mythic nemesis. This picture is much flashier and more assaultive than the original (and it's also, at two hours and eight minutes, a hell of a lot longer). But the Christian/mythological subtext that Scorsese dredges up and places in the foreground has the effect of increASINg our emotional distance from the story. Besides, it isn't true subtext; it's stuff that has been imposed on, rather than discovered in, the material. This is still, at heart, a picture whose sole aim is to give its audience huge, bowel-loosening shocks; the veneer of moral seriousness and psychological complexity that Scorsese brings to the enterprise feels like an attempt to convince himself that he's not doing what he's doing. The movie keeps insisting that the gruelling experience it's putting us through is really meant to edify us; it drags us into the mud and then tells us that we haven't got dirty. This is Scorsese's worst picture-an ugly, incoherent piece of work. With Robert De Niro (frenetic but thoroughly uninteresting as the villain), Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, Juliette Lewis, and Illeana Douglass. Joe Don Baker, playing the small part of a private detective, gives the liveliest performance; he's so good that you wish he were playing De Niro's role. The stars of the 1962 version, Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck, make brief appearances, and the score is a re-orchestration of Bernard Herrmann's original music. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
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