Screen
Alleva, Richard
stance. While Faisal Husseini spoke--hunched over the microphone, trying to hold the attention of the university audience-hooded PFLP activists plastered the walls with pictures of...
...In the answer to this question we discover what is truly obscene about Cape Fear...
...Heelan expertly handles the emerging and conflicting personalities of the individuals, but the play's greatest strength is in the presentation of the group...
...Scorsese can engulf you in the tyrannical passions of his heroes...
...One can believe that these are men doing a real job and borrowing what strength they can get from one another...
...yet the program says, "Time: the present...
...It is the work of a man who has lost all contact (if he ever had it or even wanted it) with the beauty of everyday life and with the concerns of nonobsessed people...
...They ultimately become much less interesting for the very same reason...
...In 1969, H. Rap Brown (whose name keeps coming up in the play) was tried for his part in the incident...
...First and foremost among these devices is the way Nick Nolte has been directed to play the lawyer...
...It is not a misnomer...
...Feldshuh, a physician as well as a director and playwright, has used the celebrated/infamous "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" as the starting point for his play...
...Were these only rhetorical flourishes, or did these men really mean what they said...
...Had Palestinian political leaders attempted to come to Bethlehem University in such an open way on previous occasions, the Israeli army might well have closed the campus...
...Husseini talked about political pragmatism as the key to participation in the peace talks...
...This movie is, rather, an extraordinary failure which grips the viewer not with suspense but with cinematic hysteria and stomach-churning violence...
...Between the two of them is Raymond, an older man, who has chosen to do only the work demanded--which he does well--and with no expectations beyond the immediate job to take his comfort in personal pleasures...
...The scene was a vivid enactment of the inevitable conflicts existing on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as Palestinians attempt to break with their recent past and move to a different future...
...And Bowden's family has contempt for him even before Cady appears on the scene...
...This Cady not only read law books and built up his physique in prison but can endure boiling water flung into his face without wincing...
...In the 1962 Cape Fear, Gregory Peck invested the lawyer with his usual stiff dignity, shakeable under pressure but never quite undermined...
...Mother and daughter (the sons have been eliminated in this adaptation) treat the lawyer with a breezy contempt as a slick shyster whose successful practice keeps the household well stocked...
...Cape Fear isn't a negligible failure because Scorsese's cinematic expertise doesn't allow him to produce anything weak and pusillanimous...
...But the obsessive in the MacDonald story isn't its hero but its villain...
...As Mrs...
...The play, which was first produced by the Hartford Stage in 1986 under the Dramatists Guild Foundation's New Plays Program, finally reached New York in an Atlantic Theater production...
...And they do so...
...I saw it at a recent production at the Philadelphia Theatre Company...
...That Sunday evening, back at the university, I found a text on botany with a passage describing Opuntiaficu-indica, the prickly pear...
...But he is so besotted by Cady's will-to-power that he turns the character, quite literally, into a superman...
...And yet, there had been a change, though no one can say how long it will last...
...When Sam looks down at the criminal's body and realizes that "he had turned this elemental and merciless force into clay and dissolution," the reader shares his relief and even his exultation...
...The students listened intently, and many took part in the question period following the two main speeches...
...The fact of this forum is exceptional...
...Judaism has given the world not only the belief in one God, but the idea that all men and women are created in God's image...
...The novel works in a very simple, straightforward way because, through his superb craftsmanship, the author makes you share his admiration and pity for the resourceful victims, and his loathing for, and fascination with, the ingenious psychotic...
...The skeleton of The Executioners still exists within the body 20 December 1991:749 of this Cape Fear...
...tt is not even a reportorial play in the present...
...Israeli military law under occupation forbids meetings or gatherings of more than ten persons...
...In brief, Max Cady is the Master of the Universe, but what does a moviemaker do with the master when he has to be killed off at the end of the movie...
...Hovering over the action is the smoke rising from the fires set during the race riots in Cambridge, July 24-26, 1967...
...When I see clusters of prickly pears on the hillsides of the Shephela in the future, the images that come to mind will not be only those of thorns, barbed wire, and bulldozers...
...In the earlier Cape Fear, Robert Mitchum, giving arguably the best performance of his career, played Cady close to the author's conception as an utterly self-enclosed personality, meanly taunting and self-satisfied...
...Now the released Cady threatens to rape Bowden's wife and barely pubescent daughter and to kill his two little sons...
...The trouble is, because the Bowdens have been so grotesquely reduced and Cady so grotesquely glorified, the audience's simple need to see virtue vindicated and evil punished is frustrated...
...And the skeleton rejects the body...
...Let us celebrate the rituals of justice and rejoice in the hymns of truth, for the awe of the moment is a promise of the future, which we must redeem...
...Perhaps, I thought, this process might spread throughout the occupied territories...
...Troops were just twenty yards away on the roof of the neighboring school for the blind, pointing their automatic weapons toward the courtyards and gardens where some students sat talking...
...De Niro, even as he torments the people in front of him, seems to be looking over their heads at an angry deity who is cheering his agent on...
...Later, after she's had a brush with Cady (an attempted rape of the girl's mind rather than her body which is easily the best scene in the movie and which, in fact, belongs in a better film), the child is so manhandled by her father that the viewer may think she's in more danger from him than from the rapist...
...close-knit group is also at the heart of David Feldshuh's Miss Evers's Boys, a play that has been in process since 1986 and has been moving from one regional theater to another since its 1989 debut at Baltimore's Center Stage...
...And, for this very reason, Scorsese hates them and punishes them with Cady, a man with a mission...
...Of the whites, Beauty, who is proud of his body and his sexual exploits, is closer in spirit to Raymond than to Thomas, with whom he competes for a promotion to bricklayer...
...The title is grimly apt for the story...
...A humane motive is given for this legal impropriety, yet Scorsese uses every device in his director's repertoire to make Bowden look like a worm who deserves all that befalls him...
...With this revelation, the characters explode, each in his own way, but at the end the work goes on and the group seems to be re-forming...
...Cape Fear is a very low point in the career of America's greatest filmmaker...
...And once the pressure is on, he immediately disintegrates...
...In this filmmaker's world, it's not what you do that counts, but whether or not you are doing it in the service of a big cause...
...The Bowdens, on the other hand, constitute your typical, easygoing, secularistic, materialistic, agnostic, drifting American family...
...Foos is a whiner and a drinker, angry at being short-changed by white society, unable to understand why he has not been rewarded for the work that he avoids doing...
...who would be building a hotel in the 1990s...
...But the late John D. MacDonald gets his posthumous revenge...
...De Niro fleshes this out with his hillbilly accent, smile-slitted eyes, and quizzical tilt of the head...
...While Faisal Husseini spoke--hunched over the microphone, trying to hold the attention of the university audience-hooded PFLP activists plastered the walls with pictures of their leader, George Habash...
...There is a sixth character, the contractor in charge of the project, whose sole concern seems to be the job and who is unable to show overtly his sympathy for Thomas when he gets burned by the distant fires...
...They just want to live and let live...
...he is the lawyer who defended the rapist and who deliberately botched the defense...
...Martin Scorsese's film is a remake of the Gregory Peck-Robert Mitchum thriller of the early sixties, but both movies derive from the John D. MacDonald novel, The Executioners...
...It is the work of a man who has spiritually mutilated himself in the pursuit of spiritual fulfillment...
...Martin Scorsese is interested only in obsessives...
...Now, if Scorsese had been content with this single alteration of the story, he might have achieved something coherent and truly powerful...
...Instead there was amicable debate...
...Finally, a hurricane at sea, a sinking boat, and being handcuffed to the submerging wreck combine to do in this demigod of recidivism and, perhaps needless to add, he goes under speaking in tongues...
...I certainly hope Scorsese never makes a movie about international terrorism...
...And Haidar Abdul Shaft, chief of the Palestinian delegation, in his poetic speech: "Let us light the candle of peace and let the olive branch blossom...
...True, the army still maintains a threatening presence, and Molotov cocktails are still sometimes tossed at the Bethlehem police station...
...Bowden, Jessica Lange, in a performance that is one lengthy sneer, never once gives her mate a look of love or pity or commiseration...
...There are no Rap Brown activists here...
...Well, no, because Nolte's Bowden is such a fool that he doesn't fully reveal to the girl the danger she's in...
...Well-acted, well-directed, well-designed, well-received, the production extended its original off-Broadway run, but even so the play will be gone by the time this review appears unless, as rumor has it, Distant Fires gets picked up for further exposure at Lincoln Center, which the play certainly deserves...
...Enclosed within these protecting walls, Palestinians were free to debate with their leaders and one another...
...can be smashed over the head six times with crowbars without losing consciousness, coordination, or cool...
...It is powerfully loathsome even when it is patently absurd...
...A bricklayer is to be hired, which means a union card for the chosen man, and although Thomas is much praised when he tries for the job, the bricklayers, made nervous by that smoke from Cambridge, choose Beauty, who is willing to step down for Thomas until the contractor makes clear that Thomas will not get the job in any case...
...Although the blacks among them have felt the indignities that led to the fires in Cambridge, they and their white fellow workers are fueled by personal rather than larger social concerns...
...But, apart from the initial flurry of poster-pasting, the two-hour meeting was orderly and calm...
...But doesn't the daughter realize the agony her parents are undergoing...
...The lawyer then takes more sordid measures such as having his tormentor tailed and then assaulted by thugs, but these don't work either because Cady is cunning and tough...
...It was also a true novelty...
...Distant Fires is not a historical play...
...The story is still, even after all of Scorsese's hocus-pocus, a tale of a rapist tormenting innocents...
...The treatment, which was in fact nontreatment, began in 1932 and continued until 1972 (even after the discovery of 750: Commonweal...
...Bowden takes legal steps but without effect because the ex-con cleverly uses the legal system for his own ends...
...When they must report to the military governor for new cards, they are required to pay a fine of more than $60...
...Shamir's intransigent address, I found such hopeful passages as: "We must live without war, without bloodshed...
...In this version Bowden isn't the one who apprehended and testified against Cady in the rape case that sent him to jail...
...Its habitat, the text confirmed, is dry and rocky, and its stems carry bristling groups of sharp spines...
...Robert De Niro lends magnetism and even a perverse charm to Cady...
...SCREEN OBSESSION OVERREACHES SCORSESE'S 'CAPE FEAR' bsessives are more immediately fascinating than "normal" people because they enact their psyches...
...And this gives rise to a question which haunts me: Does Martin Scorsese think a child is in more danger from her middle-class family than from the most brutal of criminals...
...Never once are we allowed to feel that this man is going through hell because he loves his family...
...Even before Cady moves in, Nolte makes Bowden an uninteresting mediocrity...
...Palestinians and Israelis, all men and women created in God's image, "standing tall among the community of nations...
...he is the most articulate about the wrongs blacks suffer and with reason since, a resident of Cambridge, he has been picked up and roughed up by the police who mistake him for one of the rioters...
...The seeds may come from Heelan's past, but the tensions among the characters are recognizable in the present...
...Once the pressure is on, the pair spend a lot of time screaming at each other hysterically and this acrimony produces revulsion in the daughter who withdraws to her room and covers her ears with headphones...
...It is interesting that Heelan, who is black and who must have had a somewhat similar role in the crews he worked with in his own summer-vacation days, has made the character white...
...Thus, Cape Fear is an obscene movie...
...Instead of getting a thriller, they must sit through a movie of uncontrolled, crackpot complexity...
...That is why Mean Streets, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, and 748: Commonweal the "Life Lessons" episode of New York Stories, all featuring driven protagonists, are the best movies this amazingly gifted man has made and are among the best films of the last two decades...
...Heelan has suggested that his play offers a metaphor for racial harmony, and I suppose it does, but the ending is a great deal darker, sadder, more painful than the opening...
...So the director devotes all his skill and cinematic flair to making a character conceived by MacDonald as a clever psychopath into a magnetic, quasireligious seeker after truth, a person who feels so unjustly treated by Bowden that he determines not only to avenge himself but to teach the lawyer the very meaning of suffering and even urges his victim to read the Book of Job in preparation for the travails to come...
...It is a men-at-work play (like David Storey's The Contractor) in which five workers--three black, two white--pour and spread concrete, while they joke, complain, protest, accuse, and protect one another...
...There was, however, another reality...
...Angel, the college-bound temporary who got the job through his father's connections, is a likable boy trying to be one of the men and inevitably is the butt of most of the jokes...
...Roadblocks had cut off the university from the outside world...
...It's likely that few of the more than 1,000 students on hand had ever experienced this kind of debate before, with their leaders actually addressing them...
...But De Niro turns Cady into a character out of Flannery O' Connor: full of fire and brimstone and a murderous desire to fulfill the will of an utterly vengeful, loveless, pitiless God...
...An Israeli reporter from the Jerusalem Post noted: "Here there had been no demonstrations, no clashes, and no confrontations...
...Bowden smashes him over the head with rocks (that's how Peck subdued Mitchum in the other movie), but Cady's head doesn't bust...
...stood in the large auditorium fascinated...
...Outside the campus Israeli soldiers had surrounded the university...
...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE INFECTIOUS GROUPINGS 'DISTANT FIRF.S' & 'B_9 evin Heelan's Distant Fires takes place on an unfinished upper floor of a beach hotel being built in Ocean City, Maryland--presumably the kind of construction site on which the playwright worked for three summers in the early 1970s...
...Sam Bowden, a lawyer so humane and scrupulous that his senior partners have shunted him away from their more ruthless dealings, is approached by a man from his past: Max Cady, a rapist whom Sam both apprehended and helped to convict fourteen years previously...
...But to value obsessives over others just because of the fascination they exude is obscene...
...more radical groups either rejected the negotiations altogether or were sharply critical of the tactics adopted by their official spokespersons...
...Scorsese isn't having any of that...
...But against this backdrop of violence, the intifada may be taking on a new dimension...
...Finally, after the ex-con nearly kills one of Bowden's sons, the lawyer tells his wife that they must murder Cady themselves...
...knows the collected works of Henry Miller from cover to cover, etc...
...I looked again at the opening speeches at the Madrid peace conference and, rereading Mr...
...Rather, he is being put through hell because he is a man living with a dirty little secret that will out...
...The audience still wants to see Cady brought down and the Bowdens saved...
...But it does have bright yellow flowers and edible brick-red fruit, "the size of a hen's egg...
...Many students and staffwere incensed at the way some soldiers had tom up students' identification cards as they came to the campus...
...I will hope to see blossoms yielding a harvest of fruits yellow and purple...
...Without ID cards, Palestinians cease to exist...
...The Bowdens' daughter sets him on fire, but Cady doesn't burn...
...These fires are distant by more than twenty years...
...For all his ferocity, he is Scorsese's arm of God and that is why the director is able to make only De Niro's character a compelling one...
...What does Scorsese make of the people who must fight Cady off...
...Unlike Foos, Thomas--momentarily in charge of the group while the lazy, well-connected white crew boss is away--is convinced that by working conscientiously he can move onward and upward in the best American tradition...
Vol. 118 • December 1991 • No. 22
