Cape Fear

Cape Fear is a crime thriller about a small-town lawyer, Sam Bowden, whose life is upended when the man he helped convict returns to town. Max Cady has served a prison term for a sexual assault, and he blames Bowden for his imprisonment. Once free, Cady begins quietly menacing Bowden's wife and teenage daughter, staying just careful enough to avoid breaking the law while making clear that he intends to settle the score. With the local police chief and a private detective unable to stop him, Bowden finds himself legally powerless to protect his family, and eventually decides to set a trap for Cady of his own.

Released in 1962, the film was directed by J. Lee Thompson, the fifth of the twenty-one features he made in chronological order, following The Guns of Navarone and preceding Taras Bulba. James R. Webb wrote the screenplay, and Sy Bartlett produced. Gregory Peck plays Sam Bowden, with Robert Mitchum as Max Cady, Polly Bergen as Peggy Bowden, Martin Balsam as Police Chief Mark Dutton, Lori Martin as Nancy Bowden and Jack Kruschen as Attorney Dave Grafton, among a credited cast of twenty-nine.

The film earned a critics' rating of 7.9 out of 10 from twenty-five reviews. On IMDb it holds 7.7 out of 10 from more than thirty-one thousand votes, and on TMDB 7.4 out of 10 from several hundred votes. Against a budget of 35 million dollars, it took in 103 million worldwide.