Directed by J. Lee Thompson • 1962 • United States
Starring Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, Polly Bergen
Screen legends Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum face off in this terrifying tale of revenge built around one of the screen’s all-time great villains. Mitchum is mesmerizingly menacing as Max Cady, a seedy ex-con who comes to a small southern town to terrorize prosecutor Sam Bowden (Peck), the man who put him away eight years earlier. But when Cady sets his sights on the lawyer’s wife and daughter, Bowden is faced with a profound moral dilemma—how far will a law-abiding citizen go to protect his family from a man who has absolutely no regard for the law? The unrelenting tension is enhanced by Bernard Herrmann’s dread-inducing score.
Up Next in Southern Gothic
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Eve’s Bayou
Directed by Kasi Lemmons • 1997 • United States
Starring Jurnee Smollett, Meagan Good, Samuel L. Jackson“The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old . . .” So begins Kasi Lemmons’s spellbinding feature debut, an evocative journey into the maze of memory steeped in fragrant southern-gothi...
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The Night of the Hunter
Directed by Charles Laughton • 1955 • United States
Starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian GishTHE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—incredibly, the only film the great actor Charles Laughton ever directed—is truly a stand-alone masterwork. A horror movie with qualities of a Grimm fairy tale, i...
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The Beguiled
Directed by Don Siegel • 1971 • United States
Starring Clint Eastwood, Geraldine Page, Elizabeth HartmanThis chilling, Civil War–set western casts Clint Eastwood stars as a wounded Yankee soldier who finds himself convalescing in a Confederate all-girls school, a charged setup that precipitates...
