It must have appealed to his sense of the unbound: to expose his rigorous talent to the savagery not only of the boxing arena, but the consumptive demons that jabbed away inside LaMotta's battered skull.īut Scorsese demurred.

He nagged the director with his well-thumbed copy of LaMotta's biography, Raging Bull: My Story, a book he had read while shooting The Godfather Part II. In truth, it was De Niro's hunger that drove such an unsettling proposition to the screen. While scholars and cineastes will harp on about Scorsese's indelible craft, this - even more so than Taxi Driver-is the collective work of the sacred triumvirate of the tiny Italian movie god, his earthly son Robert De Niro, and the holy spirit of screenwriter Paul Schrader (who reworked Mardik Martin's original script). This is a film about man's capacity for self-destruction, where its protagonist lived his own metaphor. Pugilism was mere context Scorsese was sold on the heart of darkness. When he came to research the sport, he visited a couple of fights where only two images stuck with him: the blood-soaked sponge wiped across the fighter's back, and the pendulous drops left smeared on the rope. For all the reams of paper poured out on the grandeur of the recreations of Jake LaMotta's most celebrated bouts, which strike the movie like a drumbeat, Martin Scorsese had no interest in strategy or prowess. or even a GoodFellas, but the angry voice of American cinema rang as clear and cold as the ringside bell back in 1980, when Martin Scorsese laid down a peerless imprint of what cinema could aspire to - art, truth and exhaustion. It is hard to adore Raging Bull like an E.T.

The chocolatey velvet of its blood - incidentally, all Jake LaMotta's - spurting, gushing and draining away like rainwater, where every vital droplet tells you something you probably didn't want to know. Those virtuoso dimensions of character, boldly grim and depressing to the bitter end, reducing viewers to gibbering wrecks, slumped by the shocking depravity that can be touched by the human spirit.

Those contrasting licks of docu-drab and dreamily inventive black-and-white cinematography, framed to perfection. Let’s not quibble, Raging Bull is everything it is cracked up to be.

Raging bull the film