Lucky LouLou Green has us checking the locks this week with Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of the 1962 thriller, itself taken from John D. MacDonald’s novel The Executioners. The project began at Steven Spielberg’s Amblin with Robert De Niro attached as Max Cady, before Spielberg and De Niro talked Scorsese into directing. Filming began on 19 November 1990 in South Florida, standing in for North Carolina, with Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange and Juliette Lewis as the Bowden family. The houseboat climax was shot last, in a purpose-built ninety-foot water tank, and took four weeks instead of two.

Made for a budget usually given as $35 million, Cape Fear opened at number one in the US in November 1991 and took $182.3 million worldwide, making it Scorsese’s biggest hit to that point. De Niro and Lewis were both nominated for Oscars, and it holds 77% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes. A TV series version with Javier Bardem arrived on Apple TV in 2026, proving you can’t keep a good stalker down.

TRAILER GUY PLOT SYNOPSIS

In a world... where justice is blind, and occasionally looks the other way... one man has had fourteen years to think about his lawyer. Max Cady has read the law. He has read the Bible. He has had a fair amount of it tattooed on himself. And now he has a lot of free time.

Sam Bowden has a beautiful home, a loving family and one very small professional shortcut he hoped nobody would ever notice. Somebody noticed.

This autumn... he’s not breaking the law. He’s just standing very near it. Cape Fear. Counsel is advised to run.

FUN FACTS

• Steven Spielberg handed Cape Fear to Martin Scorsese and took back Schindler’s List, which Scorsese had been attached to. Spielberg’s explanation for passing on Cape Fear: “I wasn’t in the mood; it’s as simple as that.”

• When Steven Spielberg was developing Cape Fear, he had Bill Murray in mind to play Max Cady. Somewhere there is a very different film.

• Martin Scorsese wanted Harrison Ford as lawyer Sam Bowden. Ford would only sign on if he played Max Cady and Robert De Niro played the lawyer. De Niro declined.

• Nick Nolte won the role of Sam Bowden by turning up to the Goodfellas premiere in a blazer and tie, to prove to Martin Scorsese he could pass for a lawyer.

• Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and Martin Balsam, stars of the 1962 Cape Fear, all appear in the 1991 remake. It was Gregory Peck’s final cinema role.

• The Juliette Lewis and Robert De Niro school theatre scene was filmed without rehearsal, and the first of three takes is the one in the film. Lewis did not know what De Niro was going to do with his thumb.

• Max Cady’s tattoos took an hour and a half to apply. Make-up artist Ilona Herman chose the Bible verses with Robert De Niro, and a jailhouse-tattoo specialist advised on the lettering.

• The Cape Fear score is Bernard Herrmann’s music from the 1962 film, reworked by Elmer Bernstein, who admitted Herrmann “would have killed” him for it.

• Martin Scorsese hated the Cape Fear script the first three times he read it, and had screenwriter Wesley Strick write twenty-four drafts.

• The Simpsons episode “Cape Feare”, with Kelsey Grammer’s Sideshow Bob stalking Bart, was pitched after writer Wallace Wolodarsky saw the Scorsese film. For many people it is now the definitive version.

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Susan sends us to Brooklyn this week for She’s Gotta Have It, the 1986 comedy-drama that launched Spike Lee. He wrote, directed, produced and edited it, and it only exists because his previous project, a bike-messenger film called Messenger, collapsed in 1984 when the money never arrived. So he wrote something he could afford: twelve days in the summer of 1985, on $175,000, with a non-union crew and no permits or insurance. Tracy Camilla Johns stars as Nola Darling opposite Tommy Redmond Hicks, John Canada Terrell and Lee himself, who played Mars Blackmon because there was no money to pay an actor.

She’s Gotta Have It won the Prix de la Jeunesse in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes before Island Pictures opened it in New York on 8 August 1986, in a single cinema. It went on to gross just over $7.1 million in the US, holds 91% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and in 2019 joined the National Film Registry alongside Purple Rain and Clerks. Lee remade it as a Netflix series in 2017. Not a bad return on twelve days’ work.

TRAILER GUY PLOT SYNOPSIS

In a world... of brownstones, bicycles and very large beds... one woman has made a decision. Nola Darling will not be tied down. Not by convention. Not by expectation. And certainly not by any one of the three men currently leaving their belongings in her bathroom.

Jamie has devotion. Greer has cheekbones. Mars has a bicycle, a pair of Air Jordans and absolutely no off switch. Each believes he is the answer. None has stopped to ask what the question was.

This summer... three men, one woman, and a Thanksgiving dinner nobody should have agreed to. She’s Gotta Have It. They’ve just gotta deal with it.

FUN FACTS

• Mars Blackmon got his name from Spike Lee’s grandmother. Stuck for a name, Lee asked her, and she said: “I had a crazy uncle named Mars.” The same grandmother gave him the seed money for She’s Gotta Have It, saved from 50 years of Social Security cheques.

• The Michael Jordan and Mars Blackmon Nike adverts began with She’s Gotta Have It. Wieden+Kennedy’s Jim Riswold and Bill Davenport saw the trailer, then the film, and rang the number listed for Spike Lee in the Brooklyn phone book. Lee thought it was a wind-up.

• What sold Nike’s ad men on Mars Blackmon was that he keeps his Air Jordans on in bed. The first Spike Lee and Michael Jordan commercials aired in February 1988 for the Air Jordan III.

• She’s Gotta Have It is in black and white except for one colour sequence, Nola Darling’s birthday dance, which Spike Lee called a homage to The Wizard of Oz.

• The MPAA gave She’s Gotta Have It an X rating three times. Spike Lee pointed out that Body Double and 9½ Weeks had both been rated R, and kept cutting until he got one too.

• Spike Lee kept it in the family: his father Bill Lee wrote the score and plays Nola’s father, his sister Joie Lee plays Clorinda, and his brother David Lee took the stills.

• Law & Order star S. Epatha Merkerson made her screen debut in She’s Gotta Have It as sex therapist Dr. Jamison.

• To research Nola Darling, Spike Lee circulated a questionnaire among 35 women. One question asked whether all men are “basically dogs”. The film suggests he got an answer.

• The end credits of She’s Gotta Have It proudly announce that the film contains no Jerri curls and no drugs, and thank Nike, Reebok and H&H Bagels.

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Blake’s choice this week is Secretary (2002), a film you probably wouldn’t have rented for a quiet evening with your parents. Directed by Steven Shainberg and written by Erin Cressida Wilson, it stars Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader. This independent production had a reported $4 million budget and was filmed in Los Angeles, with carefully designed interiors giving it that slightly strange, almost dreamlike look.

Secretary won Sundance’s Special Jury Prize for Originality and helped put Gyllenhaal firmly on the map. Roger Ebert praised the lead performances and its handling of difficult subject matter. Its mix of awkward humour, tenderness and discomfort has kept people talking ever since, earning it a cult following well beyond its original release.

TRAILER GUY PLOT SYNOPSIS

In a world… where a fresh start comes with a typing test… Lee Holloway is looking for a job and a little independence. What she finds is a lawyer with exacting standards—and an approach to staff development that really should have been mentioned in the interview.

As the paperwork piles up, an unusual attraction takes hold. She wants direction. He likes giving orders. Neither is quite prepared for where this working relationship might lead.

This time… taking dictation is only the beginning. Secretary. A story of longing, control… and an HR department conspicuous by its absence.

FUN FACTS

• Secretary began as a short story in Mary Gaitskill’s 1988 collection Bad Behavior.

• On the page, the main character is called Debby Roe. Her boss is never named beyond “the lawyer”.

• Angelo Badalamenti, a regular David Lynch collaborator, composed the score. That might explain why this office never feels entirely ordinary.

• Listen out for Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man” and Lizzie West’s “Chariots Rise” on the soundtrack.

• Shainberg and production designer Amy Danger spent two years planning the office spaces. Quite a commitment to getting the workplace right.

• My Beautiful Laundrette inspired Shainberg’s approach to presenting an unconventional relationship as something natural.

• The bent-over figure on the famous theatrical poster is a model, not Gyllenhaal.

• Wilson picked up the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay for her work on Secretary.

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