RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesJun 30, 2026; Denver, Colorado, USA; Miami Marlins right fielder Owen Caissie (17) celebrates as he rounds the bases on a three run home run in the eighth inning against the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field. Mandatory Credit: Isaiah J. Downing-Imagn Images | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect
Welcome back to BCB After Dark: the hippest gathering of night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in and cool off with us. We’re so glad to see you. There’s no cover charge. We’ve saved a special table for you. The hostess will seat you now. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last week I asked you what the best Cubs’ Deadline trade ever? I should have been more specific because I meant the Cubs adding players for a title race and not selling players. Obviously the Javy Báez for Pete Crow-Armstrong deal would be among the best if I meant the Cubs selling players for prospects. And as hard as it is to believe now, the Cubs acquiring Jake Arrieta and Pedro Strop in 2014 was about the Orioles adding Scott Feldman at the time.
Having said all that, 40 percent of you said the Aroldis Chapman deal was number one. That makes sense, since it was the only one that resulted in a World Series title. Another 30 percent of you went with the Rick Sutcliffe deal in 1984.
Here’s the part where we listen to music and talk movies. You can skip that if you want. Or you can read that and skip the baseball stuff. Or you can read it all.
Tonight we’re featuring Welsh vocalist Judith Owen with a music video of hers from this past April “To Your Door.” John Maestas is the guitarist.
There’s been renewed interest in Cape Fear because of the new television series, which stars Javier Bardem and Amy Adams. I’m going to confess that I’ve seen none of it. But what I have seen is the 1962 original movie, directed by J. Lee Thompson, and the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake. So I thought I’d take this week to do one of my favorite exercises, which is comparing the original film to the remake.
Tonight, we take on the 1962 original, which stars Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and Polly Bergen. Mitchum plays Max Cady, who has just been released from a Georgia prison after serving an eight-year sentence for rape. (more on that later.) He immediately tracks down Sam Bowden (Peck), a prosecuting attorney who witnessed the attack and testified against him. Cady blames Sam for his eight years in prison and the fact that his wife and daughter left him. Later in the film, he confesses he spent every day in prison dreaming about his revenge.
Cady immediately starts stalking Sam and his family, although he’s very careful to keep his interactions to within the letter of the law. See, Cady is very smart and very cunning and has had eight years in prison to read law books. When he does cross the line (as when he poisons the Bowden family dog), he makes sure that no one can pin it back on him. When Max Cady rapes a local girl (Barrie Chase), partially as a warning to Sam and partially because he’s a serial rapist, he brutalizes her so badly that she refuses to testify out of fear and flees town.
Mostly, Cady just shows up wherever Sam, his wife Peggy (Bergen) or his 15-year-old daughter Nancy (Lori Martin) go and look menacingly at them. As a prosecutor, Sam has a lot of connections with the police department and he goes to them for help. But every legal trick that Sam and the police come up with—charging him with vagrancy and not registering as a felon—Cady has already thought of and foiled. Sam tries to buy off Max, but Max can’t be bought.
Sam escalates to increasingly desperate and illegal activities to get Cady to stop harassing his family. These activities backfire on Sam and now he’s the one in legal jeopardy. That causes Sam to set up a trap for Cady on a houseboat on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina.
The overarching themes of Cape Fear are not deep. The Bowden family are the epitome of American wholesomeness. Before Max Cady breaks him down, Sam Bowden is a fine, respected member of society. He’s basically auditioning for Atticus Finch, although that part was still about eight months in the future when Peck made Cape Fear . Peggy is the loving, supportive and fairly passive wife. Daughter Nancy is 15 and is played by the 15-year-old Lori Martin, but Martin was short and comes across as much younger and much more innocent than 15. They are the ideal Eisenhower family.
Cady, on the other hand, is pure evil, but it’s an evil combined with superior intelligence and calm and cool control. Peck is great as the upstanding man broken down to raw savagery to save his family, but there were a dozen actors in Hollywood that could have played that part. I can’t imagine anyone other then Mitchum being able to play Max Cady in 1962.
So you have the good America threatened by an evil force with a legal system that protects the criminals more than the victims. If you’ve seen American crime films from the sixties to the eighties, you’ve heard this story before. But certainly the way that Peck’s noble character breaks down over the course of the film (only to regain it before the end, naturally), gives Cape Fear a bit of a different direction.
There’s one other thing that makes the 1962 Cape Fear different from the “thin line between civilization and savagery” films that would come later is that Cape Fear was still made under the rules of the Production Code. And while the Code was cracking in 1962, it still held some weight. Max Cady is a serial rapist, yet the word “rape” can’t be mentioned at all during the film. They have to work with euphemisms and “you knows,” especially when discussing Max’s threats t...
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