Max Cady
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Max Cady is a fictional character in the John D. MacDonald novel The Executioners and the 1962 film adaption Cape Fear and Martin Scorsese's 1991 remake. He was played by Robert Mitchum in the first film, and by Robert De Niro (in an Academy Award-nominated performance) in the remake. Cady ranks number 28 on the American Film Institute's list of the top 50 movie villains of all time.
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[edit] Character overview
In both films, Cady is a career criminal with an obsessive grudge against an attorney named Sam Bowden (played by Gregory Peck in the first film, and by Nick Nolte in the remake) who sent him to prison for rape. While in prison, Cady teaches himself to read as he nurtures his hatred of Bowden, made especially intense when his wife divorces him and takes their child. Upon his release, he terrorizes Bowden and his family, stalking his wife at their house, picks up an 18-year-old drifter at a bar whom he has consensual sex with and later rapes, and attempts to seduce Bowden's teenage daughter. After Bowden's attempts to get rid of him with bribery and a restraining order fail, he hires street thugs to rough Cady up, which only succeeds in making him angrier and more determined to make sure Bowden "learns all about loss." Cady tracks the family to their summer home in the titular North Carolina beach town and nearly kills them all. In the climax of the first film, Bowden puts Cady under citizen's arrest; in the second, Cady apparently drowns after a fight with Bowden.
[edit] Differences in interpretation
There are significant differences between the way in which Cady is portrayed in the first and second film; while Mitchum's characterization is that of a sleazy, degenerate con artist, De Niro's is of a homicidal sociopath who viciously attacks everything and everyone Bowden holds dear (he even beats and rapes one of Bowden's colleagues). The remake also sheds some light on Cady's background in a rural Pentecostal family who exposed themselves to poisonous snakebites and drinking Strychnine in order to achieve religious ecstasy.
There are also many differences in the films' portrayal of Cady and Bowden's relationship: in the first film, Bowden merely testified against Cady in court, while Bowden in the remake was Cady's attorney who deliberately suppressed evidence that Cady believed would have gotten him an acquittal. In the 1962 version, moreover, Bowden eventually takes the moral high ground and refuses to kill Cady; in the remake, however, Bowden wants revenge and fights Cady. Then locks Cady with cuffs to the boat, causing Cady to drown.
[edit] Pop culture references
Cady was parodied in a 1994 episode of The Simpsons entitled "Cape Feare," in which Sideshow Bob stalks the Simpson family to a Florida beach town in order to get revenge on Bart.
De Niro's portrayal of Cady was the inspiration for wrestler Dan Spivey's "Waylon Mercy" gimmick.
