the plot: Prosecutor Sam Bowden (Peck) is about to leave the courthouse one afternoon when he’s confronted by Max Cady (Mitchum), a vicious hood whom Bowden helped send to jail eight years earlier. His time served, Cady has moved to the small Georgia town where Bowden lives and sets in motion a concentrated campaign of terror against the lawyer. Soon, Cady begins stalking Bowden’s wife (Bergen) and daughter, Nancy (Martin), following the family to the supermarket and badgering Nancy at school. The family’s dog is poisoned, but even after enlisting the aid of the town’s police chief and a hardnosed private detective, Bowden finds that, legally, he can’t do a thing to Cady. His options limited, Bowden begins thinking of illegal ways to stop Cady, but his efforts are no match for Cady’s wiliness. After a meeting with Cady’s sleazy lawyer, Bowden develops an elaborate plan to lure Cady into a trap on the family’s houseboat along the Georgia coast. But Cady has other plans, and Bowden’s daughter is his primary target.

why it’s good: Robert Mitchum was one of the leading badass film noir stars of the 1950s and ’60s, and nowhere are his talents to terrify on better display than “Cape Fear.” Sure, Gregory Peck gets first billing here, but it’s Mitchum, as the sleazy, sexy Max Cady, who’s the real star. Mitchum slithers, snake-like, through the film, his overwhelming menace tempered with a perverse charm that can lull the viewer into thinking he’s not all that bad. But Cady is oh-so bad, and director J. Lee Thompson doesn’t shy away from the character’s evil. In one sequence, Cady brutalizes a young drifter. The violence is off camera, but the sound effects are enough to reveal the violence that had, until that point, only been suggested by Cady’s character. That “Cape Fear” ever saw the light of day in the early ’60s is surprising, in itself. Cady’s interest in Bowden’s daughter is purely sexual, and there are more than a few highly uncomfortable scenes in which Cady longingly leers at the adolescent girl. Even after multiple cuts, “Cape Fear” almost never made it to the screen. Director J. Lee Thompson goes for, and achieves, a Hitchcockian kind of suspense throughout “Cape Fear,” using some inventive camera placement (the scene involving Cady and the drifter is filmed from inside an open closet. When the beating starts, the closet door swings shut) and a score by Bernard Herrmann, a frequent Hitchcock collaborator. “Cape Fear” is a masterful piece of suspense and one of Mitchum’s best film roles.

why you should own it: Often overshadowed by the bigger-budget 1991 remake starring Robert DeNiro and Nick Nolte, the original “Cape Fear” is a great film noir that should be at home in anyone’s DVD library. Universal’s DVD doesn’t boast much in the way of extras, though, with a short making-of featurette and a few production stills.