10 Amazing Movies With Weirdly Distracting Castings

4. Gregory Peck - Cape Fear (1991)

A remake that's a shade better than the original, Martin Scorsese's 1991 thriller Cape Fear reinvented Max Cady for a new generation, with Robert De Niro's performance as the obsessed former convict undoubtedly one of his most iconic.

The film honours and reinvents J. Lee Thompson's 1962 original to chilling effect, with one of its more genius moves being to bring back Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck. Mitchum famously portrayed Cady in the original film - a performance almost as chilling as his turn in The Night of the Hunter - while Peck, true to type, was cast opposite as resolute lawyer Sam Bowden, the focus of Cady's ire.

Scorsese cleverly flipped the script for the remake, bringing Mitchum back on the side of Bowden as a police lieutenant who steers him outside the law, and Peck as a stereotypical southern lawyer who represents Cady in court. The two of them play these minor roles excellently, but whereas Mitchum - who throughout his career had portrayed heroes, villains, and everything in between - blends more seamlessly into the proceedings, Peck does not.

While Peck certainly took on a variety of characters over the course of his career, he's mostly remembered as the dashing Hollywood leading man. Juxtaposing that in the Cape Fear remake is a great way of subverting that persona (and again, he's great to watch), but the contrast compared to Mitchum is profound.