Foreign Intrigue (1956)

When, in 1959, Hitchcock made North By Northwest, he had to have been aware of this 1956 thriller which features a suave hero - here, it's Robert Mitchum with a suit and slicked hair playing a personal secretary to one of the world's richest men - who becomes embroiled in an foreign intrigue after the death of his employer, and like Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill, Robert Mitchum's Dave Bishop ends up in exotic locations around the world romancing a mysterious blonde, encountering mysterious trenchcoats, in a plot involving identity mix-ups and duplicitous femme fatales (and their mothers), all presented in a richly-detailed, unhurried technicolour - a solid romantic suspense movie, albeit one that flags a little at the two-third mark unlike the rivetting from start to finish North By Northwest.

★★★★☆

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Cape Fear (1991)

Because another auteur, Francis Ford Coppola, released his Bram Stoker's Dracula just a year later, I've always had this fanciful notion that Gary Oldman's Count is Scorsese's hideous, half-melted Max Cady, the monstrous-on-a-mythological-scale psychotic rapist, first played in 1962 by Robert Mitchum but immortalised here by Robert de Niro in 1991 and in my mind forever to rise, psychotic eyes first, from the depths of Cape Fear, that terrifyingly named nexus of his revenge plot against Nick Nolte's Sam Bowden, the lawyer who wronged him and whose unfortunate family members, Jessica Lange as Bowden's wife and Juliette Lewis in the performance of her career as the terrified but electrified daughter, Danielle, unfortunate pawns in Cady's game of bloodlust.

★★★★☆

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Cape Fear (1962)

Dischordant Psycho strings and jazz piano help ratchet up the tension in this twisted 1962 suspense thriller which has Robert 'Night of the Hunter' Mitchum playing Max Cady, a hideous paedophile and psychopathic stalker, fresh out of jail and hellbent on vengeance against the lawyer, Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck) who helped put him away, and of course where else would you flee with your terrified wife and daughter in such circumstances but to your houseboat on Lake Psychopathic Rapist, oops I mean, Cape Fear.

★★★★☆

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