Martin Scorsese (1980)

Raging Bull begins with slow-motion film of Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) warming up in his corner of the boxing ring.   On the soundtrack is music that will feature throughout the two hours plus of the movie.  (What sounds to an opera near-ignoramus like a cross between ‘One Fine Day’ from Madam Butterfly and ‘Over the Rainbow’ is actually an excerpt from Cavalleria Rusticana.)  The film ends with a quotation from St John’s Gospel (chapter 9, verses 24-25):

‘So, for the second time, [the Pharisees] summoned the man who had been blind and said:  ‘Speak the truth before God.  We know this fellow is a sinner.’

‘Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know’, the man replied.  ‘All I know is this:  once I was blind and now I can see.’’

The feel of the prologue and epilogue to Raging Bull suggests this is Martin Scorsese’s ‘big one’. He is not the first major American director in recent years to have made a personal investment in one particular film:  Coppola’s Apocalypse Now traumas, during its making and after its long-delayed release, are still making news.  The fourth collaboration between Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Raging Bull has also been in the works a long time and is clearly a labour of love for both men.  De Niro has described in interviews the emotional effort involved in playing Jake LaMotta, the former world middleweight champion on whose autobiography the film is based and the film is, in more ways than one, De Niro’s big one too – the culmination of his already legendary dedication to preparing for a role.  He learned jazz saxophone (expertly, according to his teacher, George Auld) for New York, New York.  He did boxing training and put on four stone in weight for Raging Bull.  (De Niro feels that he now needs a relatively light-hearted project; he and Scorsese are working on a film about a comedian on the American chat-show circuit[1].)

The black-and-white photography by Michael Chapman is right for the material and especially appropriate for British audiences who know the America of the forties and fifties entirely through monochrome images on a screen.  The boxing sequences especially would seem unreal in colour:  the sport at that time exists in our minds as the stuff of Pathé newsreels and so on; British audiences didn’t spectate ringside but from cinema seats or, a bit later, from armchairs in front of the television.  Scorsese is currently at the forefront of a campaign to publicise the poor quality of colour film stock, its rapid deterioration and the need to improve it.  The only flashes of colour in Raging Bull are the title, written in blood red, and a montage of home-movie footage of LaMotta’s courtship and marriage.  These fragments look almost vindictively washed out.

How popular will the film be with boxing enthusiasts?  Opponents of the sport tend to accuse its fans of bloodthirstiness and Scorsese emphasises relentlessly the gory brutality of the ring.  No lip service is paid to the idea that the fight game is ‘indefensible but irresistible’ – a familiar definition of the sport by its more ‘thoughtful’ supporters, who like to have it both ways.  Whatever his or her predisposition, the viewer has no chance to sit back and enjoy the fights in Raging Bull – a rapidly edited series of fists thrusting forward and slamming home, hit heads jerking backwards, bodies hitting the canvas, faces splitting open like soft fruit.  The visual elements are accompanied by much amplified sounds of thumping, crashing and squirting.  The slow-motion intervals between the volleys of blows also communicate Jake LaMotta’s experience of fighting.  The protagonist dominates the film.  It makes sense that Scorsese shoots the fight sequences from his perspective.

LaMotta is, in all circumstances, a man in search of a punchbag; his opponent in the ring supplies an especially concentrated target for his huge reserves of aggression.  He enjoys the crowd’s applause when he wins a fight yet it never appears that he needs their support or that the applause provides a lasting satisfaction.  He wants to be the best but not, it seems, chiefly to impress others.  He complains bitterly to his brother Joey (Joe Pesci) that, because they’re in different weight divisions, he’ll never fight Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion.  This means, LaMotta says, that he’ll never be able to beat the supposed best, even though he knows he’s the best.  There’s no suggestion that he regards boxing as a craft.  It doesn’t provide social status or self-esteem or confidence in his strength as a ‘big man’ within his family.   However many fights he wins, LaMotta remains as combative as ever in his dealings with people outside the ring.

Scorsese presents boxing, at all stages of LaMotta’s career, as the manifestation of psychological aggression, as a slugging striving towards self-assertion through the infliction of bodily harm.  The director entirely resists the temptation to present the world title fights in relatively grandiose terms.  This objectivity is one side of the coin the other side of which exposes Scorsese’s acknowledged lack of interest in boxing.  There are moments during the fight sequences when the image freezes and the soundtrack goes silent in order to reflect LaMotta’s point of view but Scorsese also aestheticises the boxing to less specific effect.  When slow motion takes over and the camera contemplates LaMotta, it doesn’t show a raging bull.  What we see is reminiscent, rather, of shots of athletes in films of the Olympics, emphasising graceful body movement and slowly rippling muscles.  (Another occasional, unfortunate and presumably unintentional effect of the monochrome photography, in combination with Thelma Schoonmaker’s percussive editing, is to turn the black fighters into almost metaphysically ‘dark’ figures.)  There are remarkably angled shots in the ring that are not what either LaMotta or his corner or the ringside audience is seeing.  This is visual bombast and the image-making minimises the grunginess of the ring:  when the seconds are sluicing an injured fighter, blood mixes almost seductively with water.  When a fight isn’t something experienced by LaMotta it takes place in a vacuum, albeit a skilfully composed one.

Scorsese sometimes omits factual sporting details that are needed to clarify the story.  In the film’s opening fight, LaMotta loses his unbeaten record but we don’t know how long that unbeaten record was, or what LaMotta’s potential was reckoned to be.  He has to wait a long time for his first crack at the world title.  Scorsese and the screenwriters, Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin, suggest this is because LaMotta is uncompromisingly his own man and so persona non grata with shady characters in the fight game who are well placed to set him up as a title contender.  Eventually, he agrees to throw a contest.  He does this so blatantly that he’s suspended by the boxing authorities and comes back for a title bout some two years later – but Scorsese’s concentration on the fight action and LaMotta’s personal life means we see little of his reluctance to bend to the will of boxing powers-that-be.  There’s a lot more of him being bolshy with those close to him.   The background to a much-publicised rivalry between LaMotta and Sugar Ray Robinson in the early war years (before Robinson joins up, a decision which, LaMotta believes, gains Robinson a points verdict in their second fight) isn’t made clear.  LaMotta doesn’t develop any characteristics as a sporting personality beyond his ‘Bronx bull’ label and his pride in never having been knocked down.  (It’s hitting the deck that makes his thrown fight such a giveaway; after Robinson has punished him horribly in a 1950 world title fight, LaMotta comes to the new champion’s corner and jeers, repeatedly, ‘You didn’t knock me down, Ray’).   It was only through reading a bit about LaMotta that I learned he tended to get himself behind on points and to rely on the final rounds to turn things round:  this sounds a gift to a drama but Scorsese doesn’t exploit it.  He gives little sense of how LaMotta reacts to his fans in the street.  His only social contact with the public comes after his boxing career is over and he’s running a night club in the mid-1950s.

It’s possible that much of the above will matter less to an American audience more aware of LaMotta’s standing with the press and public during his career.  And even someone like me, no boxing fan but with a fairly wide-ranging knowledge of sporting history, recognises a few of the names of fighters in the story.  As well as Robinson, there’s Marcel Cerdan (whom LaMotta beats to take the world title), although, as Edith Piaf’s great lover, Cerdan and his untimely death have become more a part of the lore of show business heartbreak than of sporting history.  It’s possible too that Scorsese, having established that LaMotta is determined to prove he’s the best, feels it unnecessary to present the world championship fight with Cerdan as a climactic point of LaMotta’s life.  Even so, it’s a surprise, given his chance to fight for the title has been so long coming, that the Cerdan bout gets no more coverage than the preceding ones.

Scorsese wouldn’t have needed to glamorise the contest with Cerdan in order to give it the attention it deserves; and the point he’s keen to stress, that winning the world title did nothing for LaMotta’s peace of mind, might have been made more strongly if the victory had, very temporarily, seemed to change his life.  In Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, Scorsese and the screenwriter Robert Getchell were anxious to avoid a hackneyed Hollywood treatment of a familiar theme.  The characters were drawn thoroughly at the expense of a detailed plot (for the unsettled heroine of a ‘road movie’, Alice didn’t travel to many places).  In Raging Bull, the skimpy narrative is more damaging and can’t be explained by Scorsese’s limited interest in boxing and determination to resist the clichés of the boxing melodrama.  If Alexander Walker in the Evening Standard is right and the film omits a full account of LaMotta’s humiliating experiences in jail, the skimping persists even after the protagonist’s boxing career is over.

That Biblical quotation (undersigned by Scorsese in a dedication of the film to a friend who died in June 1980) confirms the director’s statement that he saw Jake LaMotta’s story as one of ‘redemption’.  After his days in the ring were over, LaMotta bought his club and fronted the show there.  He served time for introducing an underage girl to men on the premises.  His club act included, as well as jokes, bits of material from a variety of sources, including Shakespeare.  The film opens and closes with shots of LaMotta (in 1964) rehearsing in front of a dressing-room mirror.  In the latter sequence, he recites Marlon Brando’s ‘I could have been a contender’ speech from On the Waterfront and Robert De Niro finds the pathos in the scene by speaking the lines as if LaMotta was concerned mainly to remember them.  Scorsese is excessively alert to the risks of sentimentalising his hero:  he may feel this is the story of a man’s losing and finding himself again but he omits the redemption.  The viewer has to judge the state of LaMotta’s world at the close of the film entirely by that dressing-room routine.  It’s unclear what Jake’s personal life consists of now.

As part of the recent publicity for Raging Bull, Jake LaMotta has given interviews.  In an Evening Standard interview with Patrick Collins, LaMotta seemed to regard his violent past with restrained regret (in both senses of the word).  By reproducing much of LaMotta’s Bronx dialect on paper and by casting him so emphatically as a ‘character’, my initial feeling reading the interview was that Collins had stereotyped him to an exasperating degree.  Perhaps, though, LaMotta has now achieved a kind of stability by basking in the cliché of battered survivor whose past aggression can now be admired from a safe distance of twenty or thirty years.  Scorsese really might have given some indication of what happened to LaMotta after 1964 (he wrote his memoir, I discovered later, in 1970).  Why wouldn’t the audience want to know this?

It isn’t clear to me what sort of a ‘Catholic’ artist Martin Scorsese is.  Most press profiles of him will mention that he intended, as a young man, to go into the church but failed his examinations.  His preoccupation as a film-maker with a human capacity for physical and mental cruelty is sometimes linked by critics with the propensity for guilt that a Catholic upbringing, and a strong awareness of sin, is alleged to ensure.  Jake LaMotta has survived into a relatively tranquil middle age[2] but we don’t know how.  It could be through a punch-drunk numbing of his violent tendencies as much as through the operation of divine grace.  In any case, Scorsese seems not to be Catholic enough to supply orthodox theological solutions; he does no more than present an individual’s state of mind in terms used in Catholic doctrine.  The obsessive quality of Scorses’s work sometimes makes you wonder if his movies are a dramatised and cathartic expression of violence that he feels in himself – a violence of which his Catholic background may have made him more conscious.

Scorsese wasn’t above a hurried and unconvincing (though entertaining) reconciliation between the heroine, her lover and her son in the last minutes of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More but he leaves the nature of Jake LaMotta’s salvation opaque.  There’s certainly no ‘between the stirrup and the ground’ moment and Scorsese, in using the word ‘redemption’, seems to do so loosely.  (I don’t know if LaMotta is nowadays a practising Catholic but it’s striking that the lives of the New York Italians in this film aren’t obviously influenced by the traditions and tokens of Catholicism.)  A large part of the audience will know little or nothing about Scorsese’s life or the recurrent themes in his work.  To such viewers, Raging Bull must seem a purely behavioural study.  It’s not every week you find a Sunday Express film review calling for greater explication of a character, rather than simply summarising the plot, but this is what Richard Barkley did last Sunday.  He complained that Scorsese had omitted LaMotta’s explanation for his apparently infinite capacity for self-laceration.  According to Barkley, this derived from LaMotta’s guilt about having, as a teenager, attacked and, he believed, killed a bookmaker.  Raging Bull wouldn’t necessarily have been a better film if it had included this explanation; and who knows when LaMotta became aware of the source of his guilt?  (The film does suggest that he grew to be as keen on psychological titbits as on quoting Shakespeare.)  Even so, it’s an irony that the boxer’s autobiography suggests a specific cause of his behaviour when the psychologically sophisticated film-maker doesn’t.

The fairly sparse detail on LaMotta’s family and social context serves to reinforce Scorsese’s tunnel vision:  he can concentrate, without causal distractions, on LaMotta’s self-destructive tendencies.  Scorsese is so good at presenting the furtive, edgily extrovert denizens of the Bronx that he comes close to giving the misleading impression that he’s fully described LaMotta’s background.  His evident belief in the original-sinful, wrongdoing potential of a human being may be accurate but he begs the question by dropping his protagonist into the story with a pre-formed outlook on life.  In an early scene, Jake makes his brother Joey hit him – not in order to be angered but rather to be hurt and able to withstand Joey’s punches without flinching.  Taking things like a man is vitally important to LaMotta and it may be what causes Scorsese to describe his story as uplifting.  LaMotta is a glutton for punishment.  Prizefighting provides him with a particularly intense way of satisfying this appetite:  having withstood physical assault, he still has the resources to assert himself against his opponent.  In his life outside the ring, his alarmingly suspicious nature is the chief source of the tensions between him and those close to him.  When his wife and his brother are provoked into cold hostility towards him, Jake is defenceless.  He can fall back only on self-pitying displays of sentimental affection towards them.  An argument conducted in terms of violent verbal abuse he can handle – he just shouts louder and more abusively than his opponent.  But his style in domestic rows, almost a reflection of those last-round comebacks that became his speciality, is one of counter-attack.

The violence in the ring is naturally relentless but hardly gratuitous.  Nor is the violence outside the ring – verbal as well as physical – but it is a more complicated matter.  A sequence in which a car door is repeatedly slammed against a man’s head (the camera doesn’t dwell on the head being slammed) is a frightening illustration of the discrepancy between the physical strength and emotional immaturity of the characters.  The aggressive language is also never pointless but there is a great deal of it – so much that, by halfway through, the audience was no longer laughing (as they usually do) every time a character said ‘fuck’:  there were just too many ‘fucks’ to keep up with.  (There were still laughs at any mention of ‘balls’.)  The profanities remind you of when, as a kid, you would try to think up the most disgusting thing you possibly could to call someone.

The characters swear too when they just don’t have the vocabulary to say anything else.  Words like ‘fuck’ come most easily to them, suggesting just as much as a naturally aggressive disposition the furious frustration of having to fall back on the word for want of a better one.  There’s a problem with this, though:  you start to feel it’s less the characters than the actors required to improvise who have to keep saying the same thing – to keep a sequence going.  The highly naturalistic playing often verges on Method acting parody.   The scripted parts of the dialogue are good, though.  There’s little that sounds forced and the (admittedly insufficient) bits of exposition are slotted in skilfully.  The dialogue in scenes between Jake and Joey and the writing of Jake’s night-club speeches are designed and delivered with a fine ear for speech rhythms.

The character of Jake’s wife Vickie (an ex-moll of the fight racketeers whom Jake is determined to subdue) is subtly developed and Cathy Moriarty plays her with great care.  (Like all the actors in the film other than De Niro, Moriarty was new to me.)  Her cover-girl looks are complemented by a voice that is slightly affected, somewhat seductive but always verging on toneless.  Vickie’s goddess-like remoteness, which draws Jake to her, begins to seem increasingly like suppressed dissatisfaction.  (It’s interesting that he goes for a girl capable of icy reticence – a quality he finds especially frustrating.)  In her one real outburst, it’s a shock (but a convincing one) to hear different notes in her voice:  they suggest the layers of nervous anger that have built up during the years of their marriage.  Cathy Moriarty brings to life a woman who’s aware enough to enjoy her sexual self-confidence – you don’t get the impression either that Scorsese has encouraged her just to ‘be herself’ or of a bright actress condescending to impersonate a less bright character.  By the time she confidently drives off to leave Jake, Vickie has acquired a shallow articulacy that you feel, looking at her turban and gloves, money can buy.  It’s also something she has learned to cultivate in her battles with Jake.  Joe Pesci gives a vivid account of Joey, the manager-brother, who needs to talk fast in order to combat Jake’s dominant personality.  At times, one suspects that Joey’s relative innocuousness (though he’s the car-door slammer) is being used for light relief but Pesci isn’t overeager and avoids playing to the gallery.  As in Taxi Driver, the smaller parts are very well cast and played.  Scorsese’s pacing of conversations always allows the viewer to read the characters’ feelings.

Audiences seem more and more often to be asked to admire an actor who is wearing make-up it took four hours to put on and take off, or who has learned to juggle – things that tend to be illustrations of professional commitment rather than of fine characterisation.  This trend made me ready to find fault with Robert De Niro but, in the event, I couldn’t (the impro longueurs are hardly his fault).  De Niro isn’t particularly overweight during most of LaMotta’s fighting career; it’s only after his retirement that he becomes enormous.  Considering what a small part of the film as a whole LaMotta’s post-boxing life occupies, De Niro could have opted for padding and prosthetic.  His first appearance as a grossly fat man is doubly alarming:  his good looks have been lost in this vastly inflated figure; one fears his expressiveness may disappear too, inside the surplus flesh.  The physical detail of his impersonation of the super-heavyweight LaMotta is, however, remarkable.  After watching a well-built but dynamic young man for ninety minutes, we suddenly confront an almost laughably roly-poly figure, hyperventilating at the least exertion.  LaMotta’s voice is weakened (and its tonal range reduced) as if by the weight he’s having to carry around.

LaMotta seems to have put on weight almost as a concealment of his violent personality.  Dumped in a police cell, he lets his violence out.  When he bangs his head against the wall of the cell, it’s a resonant image – an expression of rage which, since it causes him nothing but pain and doesn’t allow him to hurt the wall, serves only to frustrate him more.  When he starts to cry, the sobs are wrenched out of him as an admission of defeat, a realisation that he can take punishment only if he’s able to return it with interest.  In the last scene, when LaMotta is preparing to go on stage, he looks to be gearing up for the ring again.  He moves round his dressing-room, ducking and weaving – with a weird grace, in spite of the weight – and chanting, more and more passionately, ‘Go … you’re the boss, you’re the boss …’   The implication is that his life is still a fight.  He still wants and needs pain and conflict.   De Niro seems perfectly convincing as the professional fighter.  I’m no judge but LaMotta, who gets a ‘consultant’ credit and supervised DeNiro’s training, was reportedly impressed.

In Taxi Driver, De Niro had great moments when Travis Bickle, having thought up in advance what he was going to say, came to the end of it and had no idea what to say next.  There passed across his face an expression of complete blankness, which made Travis’s next words or move entirely and alarmingly unpredictable.  I was reminded of this in Raging Bull when Jake LaMotta loses his rag and transfers his violence from one person to another (when Scorsese tries to bring off this effect with both Jake and Joey, it looks contrived).  Jake is arguing with Joey and Vickie intervenes.  Jake breaks off momentarily to hear what she has to say but you can tell it’s just a pause before he resumes yelling; when the fusillade starts up again, Vickie is now the target.  De Niro handles these moments of suspended outburst wonderfully.  The violence freezes behind a mask of surprise; when it begins again, it’s via a short crescendo of bewilderment.  At one such moment, however, Jake stops and appears conscious of what he’s doing.  The thought is fleeting but De Niro registers it memorably (it seems to be sparked by the sudden silence around Jake).  The actor uses his half-grin economically here but his lively eyes supply LaMotta with a much-needed quality of mental alertness and playfulness.

De Niro never reduces his characters to a collection of vivid mannerisms, as Jack Nicholson has sometimes done; his naturalism doesn’t interfere with the rhythm of scenes the way that Brando’s painstaking playing of Don Corleone did in The Godfather.  Not the least of De Niro’s challenges in Raging Bull is that, hardly ever off the screen, he is realising an almost unrelievedly unsympathetic character.   He could have let himself off the hook by making LaMotta more of a comic reprobate or investing the character with phony nobility.  He does neither.  A particularly brilliant moment comes when LaMotta is discussing with his team an upcoming bout with a reputedly handsome opponent.  Jake agrees that Giannaro is good-looking – ‘I dunno whether to fuck him or fight him’.   This makes for a laugh but the humour is dangerous:  LaMotta is trying to assert himself – vis-à-vis both the prospective opponent and the men he’s talking with, and there’s a violence directed towards each target, though more obliquely than usual.  Right at the start of the film, after Jake has had a bust-up with a girl (and before he meets Vickie), he talks to Joey and calms down.  De Niro’s gradual relaxation into contented silence is beautifully realised.  The script gives him no obvious opportunities to introduce grace notes into Jake’s personality but De Niro humanises him as much as he can without falsifying him.  Raging Bull is Martin Scorsese’s most self-consciously artful film to date but it’s Robert De Niro’s performance that’s the work of art.

[February 1981]

[1]  Afternote:  The King of Comedy – though the words above hardly give a flavour of what the film turned out to be …

[2] Afternote:  He survived far beyond middle age, as it turned out.  LaMotta died in 2017 aged ninety- five.