Shadows

John Cassavetes’s first feature (1959), shot in 16-millimeter, centers on three siblings living together in Manhattan; the oldest, a third-rate nightclub singer (Hugh Hurd), is visibly black, while the other two (Ben Carruthers and Lelia Goldoni) are sufficiently light skinned to pass for white. This is the only Cassavetes film made without a full script (it grew out of acting improvs), and rarely has so much warmth, delicacy, and raw feeling emerged so naturally and beautifully from performances in an American film. It’s contemporaneous with early masterpieces of the French New Wave and deserves to be ranked alongside them for the freshness and freedom of its vision; in its portrait of a now-vanished Manhattan during the beat period, it also serves as a poignant time capsule. With Tony Ray (son of director Nicholas Ray), Rupert Crosse, Dennis Sallas, Tom Allen, and Davey Jonesall very fineand a wonderful jazz score by Charles Mingus. It’s conceivable that Cassavetes made greater films, but this is the one I cherish the most. 87 min. (JR) Read more

Cape Fear

It’s hard to understand why Martin Scorsese wanted to remake a nasty, formulaic 1962 thriller whose only classic credentials are a terrifying performance by Robert Mitchum and a Bernard Herrmann score. The score has been reorchestrated by Elmer Bernstein, and Mitchum is back briefly, in a cameo that carries enough reality and conviction to blow the other actors off the screen. But most of the rest of this 1991 taleabout a psychotic ex-con (Robert De Niro) who turns up in a North Carolina town to take revenge on the lawyer (Nick Nolte) partly responsible for his long sentence, focusing on his wife (Jessica Lange) and daughter (Juliette Lewis)has been inadequately scripted by Wesley Strick, and even as a simple genre picture it works only in fits and starts. With Joe Don Baker, Fred Dalton Thompson, Illeana Douglas, and, in cameos, two other refugees from the original, Martin Balsam and Gregory Peck. R, 128 min. (JR) Read more