CAPE FEAR

When it first appeared in 1962 J. Lee Thompson's "Cape Fear" was largely dismissed as just another piece of pulp fiction despite having A-listers such as Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum in the leads but it had its fans, amongst them Martin Scorsese who made a large-scale remake in 1991. Now, of course, Thompson's original is considered a classic and deservedly so. It's still pulp fiction and it's still nasty but it's a great piece of movie-making and a superb suspense picture.

Peck is the decent attorney who is being menaced by the vicious rapist he helped send to jail; it's as simple as that. What begins as purely psychological torture on the part of Mitchum's Max Cady turns increasingly more violent as the picture progresses, culminating in a brilliantly taut game of cat-and-mouse on the Cape Fear River. Peck's fine in his role but Mitchum's magnificent; it's a performance to set beside his Harry Powell in "Night of the Hunter". Add in Thompson's superlative direction, Sam Leavitt's brilliant black-and-while cinematography and a great Bernard Herrmann score and you have one of the best American films of its period and certainly one of the best thrillers of the sixties.