Up the Creek with Greg

Cape Fear (Universal-International). "You can't put a man in jail for what he might do." The hero (Gregory Peck) nods grimly. As a lawyer, he knows that the chief of police is right. But that doesn't solve his problem: a rapist (Robert Mitchum) he once caught in the act has been released from jail and has returned to North Carolina to take revenge on the lawyer and his family. How to stop him?

The police politely invite the menace to leave town; he politely refuses. They harass him with sudden searches and unreasonable arrests; he gets a lawyer and they have to stop. They also have to stop guarding the hero's house when the vil lain's lawyer threatens to tell the taxpayers how their money is being spent. Next day the hero's watchdog is poisoned. The chief of police advises him to hire a private detective: "It's a terrible thing to say, but there's nothing more we can do." While the detective tails the villain, the villain tails the hero and his family -- and skillfully accelerates the terror. He licks his lips over the hero's wife, and one day the lawyer catches him ogling his twelve-year-old daughter. Appalled, the lawyer tries to buy the brute off. Nothing doing.

He tries to scare him off. But the rapist beats up three hired bullies, makes one of them admit who hired him, counterattacks with disbarment proceedings. Desperate, Peck flees with his family up a sinister creek that leads into the cypress jungles of North Carolina. Safe at last! But are they? In the moonlight silently the sedges part and down to the dark water slithers a dark form that grins like an alligator -- but who ever saw an alligator in an aloha shirt? According to the trailers, Fear is in tended to make the moviegoers "FEEL FEAR!" and once in a while it does; but most of the time it makes him feel condescending. Its tricks of terror are too obviously tricks, and the unreality is reassuring--even soporific. What's more, at 46, Peck really ought to stop doing the boyish bit. But Mitchum as usual makes a nice shiny reptile, and it's gory good fun to watch Peck cut him up into handbags.

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