SOURCE: "Martin Scorsese's America," in USA Today, Vol. 120, No. 2562, March, 1992, p. 69.

Sharrett is an American critic and educator specializing in film studies. In the following essay, he defends Cape Fear against charges that it is a minor work, arguing that the film's depiction of "moral turbulence" extends Scorsese's examination of "what drives this nation in the post-Vietnam/Watergate epoch."

Director Martin Scorsese's controversial remake of the 1962 shocker Cape Fear is not, as a few critics have suggested, merely a potboiler to pay back Universal Studios for its support of his beleaguered The Last Temptation of Christ. Cape Fear is a logical extension of an explanation of the American soul and national identity taken on by the country's finest filmmaker of the last quarter-century. By placing it in the context of his earlier work, we can see a sustained attempt at understanding what drives this nation in the post-Vietnam...