Cape Fear (1991)

A lawyer's duty is to defend his client, but what happens when a buried secret comes back to haunt him? Martin Scorsese's "Cape Fear," written by Wesley Strick as a remake of the 1962 thriller, stars Robert De Niro as Max Cady, a tattooed, Bible-quoting ex-convict who taught himself law in prison and emerges after 14 years bent on revenge against Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte), the public defender who deliberately withheld evidence that might have helped him. Cady menacingly stalks Sam's already troubled family in their small North Carolina town, including his wife (Jessica Lange), still wounded by Sam's past infidelity, and their sullen teenage daughter (Juliette Lewis), whom Cady unnervingly befriends in a tense, manipulative encounter at her school. When Cady brutally attacks a young colleague of Sam's (Illeana Douglas), she's too frightened to testify, and Sam finds himself legally powerless. He hires a private detective (Joe Don Baker), then turns to desperate measures, including paying thugs to rough Cady up, but every move seems to backfire, and Cady's lawyer, played by Gregory Peck, even turns the law against Sam. Fleeing to a houseboat on the Cape Fear River, the family is drawn into a harrowing showdown in a raging storm. Elmer Bernstein reworks Bernard Herrmann's menacing original score, and De Niro and Lewis earned Oscar nominations. Robert Mitchum and Martin Balsam, from the original, also make cameos.