Filming At Full Throttle

By RICHARD CORLISS

From the window of Martin Scorsese's apartment on the 75th floor of a slim midtown skyscraper, Manhattan seems a pretty little thing. Central Park is a toy football field, and the swaying trees a sea of pompoms at half time. In the apartment's foyer, a poster for the furtive Italian classic Ossessione -- good title for nearly any Scorsese project -- auditions you. An old horror film flickers on a projector screen the size of Charles Foster Kane's fireplace. This is where and how God would live if he loved movies.

But is it the right place for Scorsese? His best films -- Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, the new Cape Fear -- live at gutter and gut level. Maybe Steven Spielberg, whose films are aspirations to altitude, deserves to live this high up. In fact, he keeps a facing apartment at the top of another steel stalk a few blocks away. When Scorsese moved here three years ago, Spielberg gave his friend a telescope so that movieland's two most gifted directors could keep an eye on each other. Spielberg may as well have presented him with Patriot missile parts, assembly required. "Steve's the whiz at technical stuff," says Scorsese, 48, who will soon move into a town house, closer to ground zero of the twisted city he loves. "I could never get the thing to work."

Martin Scorsese, the klutz who can get the movie thing to work like no other American filmmaker. Scorsese, the frail, asthmatic fellow whose protagonists arc toward psychopathy, or else start there and keep going. Scorsese, the ex- seminarian whose volcanic film style regularly drives the ratings sentinels bats. Scorsese, the child of Manhattan's Little Italy who today can't watch parts of Raging Bull: "Too upsetting." Scorsese, the four-times-married gent (including to Isabella Rossellini and Barbara De Fina, producer of Cape Fear) whose films are mostly about men in killer conflict. The man embraces multitudes of contradictions. He is also one of the few reasons not to be depressed about current movies.

Yet whether you love his films or hate them -- and to hate them you probably have to be insensitive to the seductive power of movie craft at full throttle -- they are of a piece, easy to spot. Start (in seven of Scorsese's 16 features) with Robert De Niro, the director's onscreen sales rep, reeking menace, ready to pose for a portrait of American evil. Introduce a second character, an audience surrogate, intoxicated by the De Niro magnetism but cramped by conscience. Put them, and a couple dozen other vultures and victims, on the street. Add a knowing rock-'n'-roll sound track, a hurtling camera that always knows where to be and an editing strategy (executed by the brilliant Thelma Schoonmaker) that shaves scenes to the bone and keeps the viewer nicely off kilter.

Scorsese's style reconciles art-house finesse with B-movie excess. And when it finds a subject to match, the result is a Taxi Driver -- brazen, desperate, ) indelible -- or a Raging Bull, which critics' polls called the best movie of the '80s. Cape Fear, while not a project Scorsese originated, has the same preoccupations, the same verve. When one reviewer ticks off the movie's themes, the auteur shrugs and says, "Yeah, sure. Guilt, obsession. All the old stuff. All my old friends."

It's true: the gang's all here. O.K., Scorsese had to be dragged kicking and equivocating into the movie; De Niro kept cajoling the director, and Spielberg, whose Amblin Entertainment produced the film, kept encouraging him to try a mainstream thriller. Even during shooting he seemed defensive. "This is only a remake," Scorsese said on the set in Florida, "an extension of the themes in the 1962 original. Look at this scene we're doing: man picks up rock, hits bad guy." But by now, as he fine-tunes Cape Fear for release next week, it is uniquely Scorsese's picture -- he couldn't sell out if he wanted to. The film is violent, excessive and, above all, entertaining; it anticipates, satisfies and then trumps the moviegoer's expectations. It plunders film history (The Night of the Hunter, Psycho, even Spielberg's shooting stars) and creates, in De Niro's character, a loner driven to impossible extremes by the voices inside him. He is brother to Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle and Raging Bull's Jake La Motta, and evil twin to Jesus in Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ.

In this remake of the 1962 sicko classic based on John D. MacDonald's novel The Executioners, the plot contours are the same: a sleazy ex-con, Max Cady, comes to a small Southern town to take his slow revenge on a lawyer who sent him to jail, and on the lawyer's vulnerable family. The basic ethical tangle remains as well: How can a good liberal fight a bad man who at first may do nothing but lurk? But now everything else is more intense, more complex. From the film's first images -- weird creatures shimmering just below sea level like monsters of the id, De Niro's eyes burning through the screen -- Cape Fear has been Bobbyized and Martyized.

In the 1962 Cape Fear, written by James R. Webb and directed by J. Lee Thompson, Robert Mitchum played Cady, and much of the movie's repellent jolt came from his look and bulk. Lounging on a street corner with his X-rated face, smirking at the fragile innocence of the lawyer's young daughter, he was a case study of "lewd vagrancy." Leaning his bare-barrel torso into a cringing Polly Bergen (the lawyer's wife), cracking a raw egg in the air and then wiping the semen-like yolk from her shoulders and breasts, caressing her, undressing her with his syrupy threats, slapping her when she can't stop wailing, he was as lurid a demon of predatory sensuality as Hollywood then dared imagine.

Mitchum was two things De Niro isn't: big and sexy. De Niro's Cady, though, has the cunning of madness. His body tattooed with Old Testament threats, he is a sleek machine of vengeance. He even has some reason for his rank righteousness. Unlike the 1962 film's lawyer (Gregory Peck), who had simply been the witness to Cady's criminal activity, this Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) was once Cady's lawyer, and he has plenty to hide. Sam, his wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) and their daughter Danny (Juliette Lewis) are no ideal family. But they are ideal marks for Cady. He is pure, they are confused. He is obsessed, they are demoralized. He is guilty, they are guilt-ridden. Whispering into the ear of Sam's secrets, Leigh's suspicions and Danny's adolescent defiance, Max is the guilty conscience in every decent person.

"When I read Wesley Strick's script," Scorsese says, "I loved Max and hated the family -- because Max moved and they just sat there. When Wesley and I got together, I said, 'I apologize for what's about to happen to you.' We stripped the script down and built it up. Now the family is in a lot of pain. They don't trust each other. Sam has had an affair whose wounds -- his wife's, his child's, his own -- he's trying to lick and live down. Going in, he's guilty, poor guy. Leigh is watching life ebb away as she nears middle age; things are bad, and they're going to get worse. And Danny despises them both. She needs to break out from them, no matter what danger she might break into. They all need a trauma that will either bind them together or completely tear them apart. So we ran all these changes on the 'good' family. And now that they're imperfect, I love every one of them."

With equal and less complicated affection, Scorsese remembers his own extended Little Italy family -- his parents' brothers and sisters and their kids, 30 or 40 in all, gathered for holiday festas on Elizabeth Street. It was a neighborhood where the "good" people and the "bad" mingled a lot more easily than the Bowdens do with Max. "Some directors," Scorsese says, "romanticize Italian-American gangsters. First of all, where we lived there were no gangs, no Jets and Sharks; that was beneath us. Second, there + was no big difference between people who went into 'certain circles' and the rest of us. There were the guys who went off to college, the blue-collar guys and the other group, the ones who had the calling. And I shuttled among all three."

Throughout his youth, Scorsese thought he had a calling too. The future director of The Last Temptation of Christ yearned to be a priest. But another vocation beckoned. Charles and Catherine Scorsese, who today make occasional endearing cameo appearances in their son's films, took young Marty to the movies, and it was ossessione at first sight. He talks of old movies as a caliph might of all his beautiful women. So many films, so much informed love. "Watching Land of the Pharaohs as a kid, I felt I was in ancient Egypt," he recalls. "And I've been obsessed with CinemaScope since I saw The Robe at the Roxy in 1953." (Cape Fear is his first wide-screen film.) In the '70s he was one of several directors asked by a film magazine for a list of old movies that might be designated as "guilty pleasures" -- orphan films he loved. Everyone else chose 10; Scorsese came up with 125, and he wasn't even winded.

"When someone compliments me on my movies," Scorsese says, "I tell them, 'Thank you, but I bet I've seen more movies than you have, and I know what's really good. I know what I'm up against." Fair enough. But his contemporaries are up against something equally formidable: the Scorsese canon. Cape Fear is a worthy addition to it; the new film meets the challenge of starting at fever pitch and then ascending to a climax that plays like a hurricane of hysteria.

Young Marty, mature Scorsese. The dreamy boy has put his nightmares and memories on film. Those old friends swaggering past Umbertos Clam House have been alchemized into tragicomic De Niros. And -- let's have a happy ending for one Scorsese picture -- the little lad from the mean streets has scaled the heights. Not just to a luxe Manhattan aerie but into the realm where almost no contemporary filmmaker can touch him. Made it, Ma, top of the world.