Cape Fear (1962) – A Movie Review

“Cape Fear” is a psychological thriller starring Robert Mitchum as ex-convict, Max Cady, looking for revenge against the man who put him in prison eight years before for rape.  Gregory Peck plays Sam Bowden Cady’s target.  But Cady’s real targets are Bowden’s wife Peggy and daughter Nancy.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Cady shows up in the small southern town where Sam lives and begins threatening his family in a veiled way.  Sam is an attorney and a friend of the town sheriff Mark Dutton played by Martin Balsam.  Dutton agrees to investigate Cady but the clever psychopath has carefully planned his campaign in a way that makes him immune to the local law enforcement.  He has a lawyer in tow who threatens the police with a harassment suit if they continue rousting him for flimsy charges.

But when his family dog is poisoned, Sam begins to panic.  He tries to buy Cady off with a $20,000 payoff but Cady explicitly tells him that what he wants is to attack Peggy and Nancy.  There are several incidents where Cady stalks the Bowdens and at one point Sam attacks Cady but he isn’t goaded into fighting back.

Sam pays a private detective to follow Cady looking for him to commit something criminal by which to force him to leave.  And he does do something heinous.  He takes up with a woman he meets at a bar and at a hotel that they go to for a sexual tryst Cady ends up brutally beating and sexually abusing her.  When the police, and Sam show up at the hotel the woman refuses to press charges.  She says that even if Cady goes to jail for ten years, she fears that when he got out, he would kill her.

Now desperate, Sam pays three thugs to beat Cady into a state where he would leave on his own.  Instead, Cady beats the three men till they needed hospitalization and one of them confesses that Sam paid them.  Cady’s lawyer reports Sam to the Bar Association for criminal behavior.

With no possibility of the sheriff for help, Sam thinks up a plan to trap Cady using his wife and daughter as bait.  He pretends to go to Atlanta to answer charges before the Bar Association while he sends his family to a remote location on the Cape Fear River on a houseboat.  But in reality, he arrives shortly after the family along with a deputy sheriff that agrees to help him guard the family from Cady.

Cady follows the private detective who was meant to lure him into the trap.  But Cady is too clever for the trappers and he manages to drown the deputy sheriff and by the time Sam has discovered this, Cady has menaced Peggy and abducted Nancy.  Sam arrives just in time to save Nancy but Cady knocks the gun out of Sam’s hand and then almost drowns him before Sam turns the tables and strikes Cady in the head with a rock.  Sam has time to get Nancy to run away before Cady returns with a club to finish him off.  At the last second Sam recovers his gun and shoots Cady.  Badly wounded Cady tells him, “Finish it.  I don’t care.”  But Sam taunts him with the news that instead of a clean death Cady would be locked up like an animal for the rest of his life for the murder he committed.  The movie ends with the Bowdon family leaving Cape Fear on a police launch headed for home.

This movie is a tour de force by Mitchum.  The rest of the cast is satisfactory but the picture belongs to him.  Watching his portrayal, I could easily believe that he actually was a degenerate criminal in real life.  He’s just that convincing.  Mitchum’s portrayal and the sense of helplessness that his plan instils in the Bowdens provides the audience with an atmosphere fraught with menace.  The movie provides effective thrills and a villain that everyone can love to hate.  Highly recommended for fans of suspense films.

Atlas Shrugged Redux

Back before the 2016 election Michael Anton made the analogy that we had to rush the cockpit to save the United States from being hijacked by its domestic enemies.  It was a good analogy at the time.  But time has revealed that when the plane landed the airport police, the air traffic controllers, the baggage handlers and even the stewardesses and the guy in the Cinnabon kiosk are all working for the terrorists and they promptly haul you off to prison for interfering with the scheduled impact of your plane with a skyscraper or government office.

However, you want to characterize the 2020 election, about half the country voted for Joe Biden.  And for the last three years they’ve seen what Joe Biden is going to do to this country.  He’s run the country into the ground.  The opinion polls say Biden is something close to neck and neck with Donald Trump for the 2024 election.  In a rational world that should not be.  Biden should be polling at 20%.

Let’s face it.  The American people are either too stupid or too crooked to want to stop what is currently going on.  You can’t persuade them that they don’t want what they obviously want.  Women want the feminist future that they have been promised.  The non-white population wants their grievances against the white population to be endlessly acknowledged and restitution endlessly paid.  The sexual deviants want their constantly changing claims about themselves continuously celebrated.  The millennials and zoomers want Gaia to be appeased by returning the human race to subsistence level technology.  And they also want to have the government pay for their college loans and allow them to live a childless existence on a government subsidy that allows them to eat crickets, watch porn and eventually die meaningless deaths.  Adding all these groups together, apparently, they have the numbers now to get their way.

Well, then that’s that.  Democracy says they should get what they vote for.  The Democrats promised them all those things.  So, let the Democrats do what they said they’d do.  Joe Biden is emptying the Treasury, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and eventually all of our retirement accounts.  He is bringing in the third world, en masse, through the Mexican border and allowing the FBI and the Justice Department to enforce a reparations policy by allowing urban street crime to go unchecked against the middle class of the cities.  Everything looks like it’s going according to plan.

There is resistance in some conservative areas of the country like the South and Central regions but for the majority of the population it’s full speed ahead.  The east and west coasts are getting rid of gasoline automobiles and oil and gas heating systems and replacing the office workers and small business people in their downtowns with migrants, homeless addicts and gangsters.  They’re indoctrinating their kids to want to be transgendered and then they’re facilitating the sexual mutilation of these children as a way to eliminate as many people as they can.

And if that is what people want, they should have it.  All the areas of the country that want these things should get them.  And they should get as much of it as possible, as soon as possible.  The areas that vote against these things will have to figure out ways to insulate themselves from these policies.  They will have to make state laws that shield things like the use of fossil fuels from any federal mandates against its use.  The states will have to protect children from federally mandated educational requirements that try to introduce sexual deviancy into the schools.  The states will have to have their own requirements to deal with the onslaught of illegal immigrants.  And they will have to protect themselves from the Justice Department and its vicious anti-white and anti-religious policies.

All these things will have to be done.  But the states that have already succumbed to the coalition of the damned (listed above) must be allowed to enjoy all the benefits they have voted for.  And they are impressive.  Their cities will become homeless encampments reminiscent of the poorer parts of Mexico City.  Their electrical grids will become more theoretical than actual.  Continuous electrical service will no longer exist but instead will become a sort of patchwork of planned outages and accidents.  Their court system will no longer adjudicate those caught in the commission of crimes by the police.  Instead, it will be used solely against political enemies of the regime, basically, straight white men who still think they have rights under the formerly enforced Constitution of the United States of America.

All these things must be allowed and even encouraged in the areas where they’ve been voted for.  And after this has been allowed to go on long enough; years, decades; who knows; then maybe, just maybe, there might be a change of heart.  Enough of these Democrats might say, “Hey, why are things so lousy here and so nice over there in Florida?”  Why does cousin Dave in Texas have neighbors who live in houses with lawns while my neighbors live in cardboard boxes on my lawn surrounded by their own droppings?  How come he’s got a Walmart and a Home Depot down the road and all I’ve got is the welfare office and the local crack house?  How come he’s got four kids and six grandkids and all I’ve got is a son who used to be a daughter and a daughter who used to be a son?

Well, anyway, that’s what I think.

A Bloomberg Poll has Trump up over Biden in 5 of 7 Swing States

NEW POLLS: Trump Beating Biden in 5 of 7 Swing States, Tied in a Sixth

“As for the state-by-state results, in Arizona, Biden is polling at 43 percent while Trump has 47 percent. Biden is also trailing Georgia (Trump 48-Biden 43), North Carolina (Trump 47-Biden 43), Pennsylvania (Trump 46-Biden 45) and Wisconsin (Trump 46-Biden 44)

The Michigan poll shows Trump and Biden in a 44 percent deadlock, and Nevada is the only battleground where Biden is shown to be leading — with 46 percent to Trump’s 43. The poll determined in a closed matchup between Biden and Trump, the former president leads his successor by 4 points overall.”

Of course, what does this actually mean if you can whip up an extra ten percent of the votes anytime you need to on election day or even a week afterwards?  But it does tell you that if Joe Biden gets “re-elected” in November 2024 there will probably be a lot of people emigrating out of blue states and into red right afterwards.

Even a Worm Will Turn. How About the Canadians?

Based on current polling Pierre Trudeau is now slightly less popular than skydiving without a parachute  but still not as unpopular as being eaten alive by rats.  At this point the Canadian press sent their stupidest reporter to try and make the Conservative party candidate, Pierre Poilievre, look bad.  It didn’t go well for the reporter.  This clip went viral.

The reporter had a bunch of lazy generalizations and stereotypes about conservatives and Poilievre slaps him down each time telling him to give specific examples or specify who “they” are that are being used as references.  It’s a lot fun.

Could the Canadians have had enough?  As with everything, in the environment we’re in only the result will answer the question.