look and i know this may suck right now and but pain be temporary and film be forever . whatever you do right now be burn into celluloid for all time and for thousand of year to come . robert de nirothis be initially a film for steven spielberg and the director hire several screenwriter to adjust the screenplay so that it more suit his theme . and so we have a dysfunctional family that be threaten by a deranged monster in the form of a recently release from prison robert de niro . like jurassic park and poltergeist and war of the world and the dysfunctional family band together to defeat the beast and the beast be the creation of the father and a lawyer who fail to defend de niro during his trial . in typical spielberg fashion and the father kill the monster that undermine the family and be then promptly absolve of his sin . like oscar schindler and robin williams and sam niel and tom cruise and virtually every daddy figure in spielberg land and the father reclaim his paternal duty in the kind of bittersweet coda that spielberg so enjoys . but spielberg eventually abandon the picture and the project be instead turn over to martin scorsese and who at the time be seek to try his hand at more commercial fare . the result be arguably the bad film in scorsese filmography and and and ironically and his most illuminating . an artist failure or misfire be often very revealing and expose the inner working of their art . when the story doesn not work and the character do not connect or the image do not sear and we find ourselves leave with a kind of inner core . this the remain carcass be what the director cinema be about . now cape fear be an impersonal film and so we would not find any thematic connection to the rest of scorsese filmography ( you already sacrifice me . de niro yell and but the film theme of catholic redemption be cookie cutter ) . what the film do and though and be expose the kind of language that his filmography hinge on . watch how scorsese camera desperately whip back and forth and how he zoom frantically onto doorknob and window in an attempt to force tension and how his character be all loud and scream for attention . but more importantly and watch how the film make no spatial sense . a showdown on a boat at the end of the film take place on an obvious sound stage and a street parade be claustrophobic and take place within no large context and the family house doesn not seem to exist anywhere in particular . there be simply no geographical sense to anything in the picture and scorsese unable to film space or create any kind of spatial environment . the reason for this be that scorsese camera always have to be bind and or intimately tethered and to his central character . for the world around the character to make sense and his camera have to be focus on the character . resnais can take you around a french hotel and welles and hitchcock can dance you down a street and up a building and cameron can give you a tour of the titanic and scott can recreate an entire future cityscape and lucas can give you an alien desert planet and and most other director can create a sense of space by textbook close up mid shot wide shot combination and but scorsese can not do this . there no poetry and no sense of tangible space in his film . he all about the character . you break that tether and you leave that box ring and that taxi cab and you look away from de niro and and everything collapse . he simply can not break away from this very documentarian style of shooting and which and in a way and be a prerequisite for action film making . scorsese try to rectify this problem with gang of new york and where the space and the set become the central character and but even this self consciously spatial experiment get sabotage by the magnetism of daniel day lewis and the actor draw scorsese camera inexorably toward him like a moth to a bulb . 5/10 even a a generic b movie and this be an ugly and vulgar look film . look at the matte painting and the inept attempt at tension and the silly rotorscoped special effect and hokey fistfight showdown . still and we have robert de niro to pick up the slack . de niro and who give his body over to scorsese like a tattooed christ and give the film it only great scene . in an improvised romantic sequence with young a juliette lewis and he stick his thumb into her mouth and kiss her . a kind of symbolic rape and the girl run away and both arouse and repel by this man interest . but de niro performance and so deliciously over the top and simply can not be imitate by scorsese . you would need the operatic tone and the baroque visuals of someone like de palma to make this work . but scorsese . nope . worth one viewing .