Raging Bull (1983)

A brutal and emotionally devastating movie based on the life of middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta, Raging Bull features a matchless performance by Robert De Niro. Director Martin Scorsese evokes Shakespearian tragedy in this uncompromising critique of masculinity, misogyny and violence, and has been described as the finest American film of the 1980s.

Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) is shown as an up-and-coming boxer in 1941, trim and full of ambition, beginning his climb to the middleweight championship. He doesn't just win his bouts, he beats his opponents bloody, consumed by a violent need to destroy them. In his personal life Jake's morals are questionable as well. Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) attracts the boxer's lustful eye while she is still a teenager, and though married, Jake dates the ice-cold blonde. He sleeps with her in his parents' home and, after discarding his first wife, marries her.

Joey (Joe Pesci), Jake's brother and manager, serves as a daffy philosophical adviser and marital consultant. He is just as violent as Jake, attacking a bunch of goons in a nightclub when he discovers one of the Mafia leaders, Salvy (Frank Vincent), trying to bed Vickie. Joey breaks Salvy's arm, but later makes a truce with the gangster and opens the door inadvertently to a relationship with the Mafia, which seeks to control Jake's career for gambling interests.

Eventually the Mafia does control Jake's matches and compels him to take a dive in one fight, an event that taints his otherwise clean reputation. So obviously is the fight thrown that Jake is almost kicked out of boxing, but he redeems himself in several hard battles and finally wins the championship. (LaMotta defeated French boxer Marcel Cerdan; however, Sugar Ray Robinson—played here by Johnny Barnes—would go on to become the nemesis of LaMotta's career, finally wresting the title from him and beating LaMotta five out of six times during his career.)

While still on top, Jake loses all control and discipline, refusing to train (De Niro gained 50 pounds to portray the out-of-shape LaMotta), and becoming insanely jealous of his voluptuous wife, believing she is sleeping with Mafia gangsters and even with his own brother. Screaming that Joey has slept with his wife, Jake pounds him to a pulp in front of his family. Jake inevitably alienates his wife and, after losing the title, loses her too.

Though jealous of his wife's supposed infidelity, Jake himself has been sleeping with the young girls who hang around his seedy nightclub—where he fancies himself a stand-up comedian and stage-floor philosopher. He is briefly jailed for serving liquor to underage girls and later makes a nightclub "comeback" by appearing at a New York hotel lounge. But his dissolution is complete. The film ends as he saunters onto a nightclub stage to brag about his disastrous life.

Martin Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader spare no one in this drama of failure. (LaMotta reportedly did not like the film; he believed—and rightfully so—that it showed him as a wild beast.) The fight sequences are brilliantly realistic, all seen from De Niro's point of view, many shot in slow motion, which intensifies the images of the brutality and the bloodletting. The dialogue richly captures the crude, brusque, often humorous world of pro fighting, with all its corruption. Tightly focused Technically, Scorsese's direction is flawless, and this film, more than any of his other works, places him among the top filmmakers of his time. The story is tightly focused around Jake LaMotta's ring experience, and Scorsese often borrows from earlier, classic boxing films, such as Champion (1949); Body and Soul (1947); The Harder They Fall (1956); The Set Up (1949); and Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). By shooting in black and white, Scorsese captures both the bleak reality of the fight scene and a visual feel of the 1940s—while implicitly referring also to the masterful black-and-white films of an earlier time.

The film also is liberally sprinkled with images of Catholicism—crucifixes, holy pictures—obliquely contrasting the icons of spirituality with the cult of violence that marked the fighter's career.

But it is De Niro's performance, a virtuoso portrait played with extraordinary energy, that makes Raging Bull a masterpiece—a dark one, to be sure. The other performances are, for the most part, very capable. Joe Pesci is genuinely funny with his fractured philosophies of life. Cathy Moriarty, however, playing the much-abused wife, is a little wooden. Everyone else is appropriately oily and distasteful. Both De Niro and editor Thelma Schoonmaker took Oscars for their work in the film.

Cast:

Performer, Character

Robert De Niro, Jake LaMotta

Cathy Moriarty, Vickie LaMotta

Joe Pesci, Joey

Frank Vincent, Salvy

Nicholas Colasanto, Tommy Como

Theresa Saldana, Lenore

Frank Adonis, Patsy

Mario Gallo, Mario

Frank Topham, Toppy

Production Credits:

Producer, Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff

Director, Martin Scorsese

Screenwriter, Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin (based on the book by Jake LaMotta)

Editor, Thelma Schoonmaker

Cinematographer, Michael Chapman