Raging Bull

RAGING BULL

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USA, 1980

Director: Martin Scorsese

Production: United Artists; part in color, prints by Technicolor; running time: 129 minutes; length: 11,588 feet. Released November 1980.

Producers: Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, in association with Peter Savage; screenplay: Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin, from the book by Jake La Motta with Peter Savage; photography: Michael Chapman; editor: Thelma Schoonmaker; sound recordists: Les Lazarowitz, Michael Evje, Walter Gest, and Gary Ritchie; sound rerecordists: Donald O. Mitchell, Bill Nicholson, and David J. Kimball; sound effects supervising editor: Frank Warner; production designer: Gene Rudolf; art directors: Alan Manser, Kirk Axtell, and


Sheldon Haber; consultant: Jake La Motta; technical advisers: Frank Topham and Al Silvani.

Cast: Robert De Niro (Jake La Motta ); Cathy Moriarty (Vickie La Motta ); Joe Pesci (Joey La Motta ); Frank Vincent (Salvy ); Nicholas Colasanto (Tommy Como ); Theresa Saldana (Lenore ); Mario Gallo (Mario ); Frank Adonis (Patsy ); Joseph Bono (Guido ); Frank Topham (Toppy ); Lori Anne Flax (Irma ); Charles Scorsese (Charlie, Man with Como ); Don Dunphy (Himself ); Bill Hanrahan (Eddie Eagen ); Rita Bennett (Emma, Miss 48's ); James V. Christy (Dr. Pinto ); Bernie Allen (Comedian ); Michael Badalucco (Soda Fountain clerk ); Thomas Beansy Lobasso (Beansy ); Paul Forrest (Monsignor ); Peter Petrella (Johnny ); Geraldine Smith (Janet ); Mardik Martin (Copa waiter ); Peter Savage (Jackie Curtie ); Daniel P. Conte (Detroit Promoter ); Joe Malanga (Bodyguard ); Allan Malamud (Reporter at Jake's House ); D. J. Blair (State Attorney Bronson ); Laura James (Mrs. Bronson ); Richard McMurray (J.R. ); Mary Albee (Underage ID Girl ); Candy Moore (Linda ); Nick Trisko (Bartender Carlo ); Lou Tiano (Ricky ); Allan Joseph (Jeweller ); Martin Scorsese (Barbizon Stagehand ); Floyd Anderson (Jimmy Reeves ); Johnny Barnes ("Sugar" Ray Robinson ); Kevin Mahon (Tony Janiro ); Eddie Mustafa Muhammad (Billy Fox ); Louis Raftis (Marcel Cerdan ); Coley Wallis (Joe Louis ); Fritzie Higgins (Woman with Vickie ); Johnny Turner (Laurent Dauthuille ).

Awards: Oscars for Best Actor (De Niro) and Best Editing, 1981; BAFTA Award for Best Editing, 1982.

Publications

Books:

Kolker, Robert Phillip, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, Oxford, 1980; revised edition, 1988.

Arnold, Frank, and others, Martin Scorsese, Munich, 1986.

Bliss, Michael, Martin Scorsese and Michael Cimino, Metuchen, New Jersey, 1986.

Cameron-Wilson, James, The Cinema of Robert De Niro, London, 1986.

Cietat, Michel, Martin Scorsese, Paris, 1986.

Domecq, Jean-Philippe, Martin Scorsese: Un Rève italo-américain, Renens, Switzerland, 1986.

McKay, Keith, Robert De Niro: The Hero Behind the Masks, New York, 1986.

Weiss, Ulli, Das neue Hollywood: Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Munich, 1986.

Wood, Robin, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, New York, 1986.

Weiss, Marian, Martin Scorsese: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston, 1987.

Lourdeaux, Lee, Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America: Ford, Capra, Coppola, and Scorsese, Philadelphia, 1990.

Connelly, Marie Katheryn, Martin Scorsese: An Analysis of His Feature Films, With a Filmography of His Entire Directorial Career, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1993.

Kellman, Steven G., editor, Perspectives on Raging Bull, New York, 1994.

Bliss, Michael, The Word Made Flesh: Catholicism and Conflict in the Films of Martin Scorsese, Lanham, Maryland, 1995, 1998.

Friedman, Lawrence S., The Cinema of Martin Scorsese, New York, 1997.

Kelly, Mary P., Martin Scorsese: A Journey, New York, 1997.

Dougan, Andy, Martin Scorsese—Close Up: The Making of His Movies, New York, 1998.

Brunette, Peter, editor, Martin Scorsese: Interviews, Jackson, Mississippi, 1999.

Articles:

Wiener, Thomas, "Martin Scorsese Fights Back," in American Film (Washington, D.C.), November 1980.

Variety (New York), 12 November 1980.

Georgakas, Dan, in Cineaste (New York), Winter 1980–81.

Thomson, David, "The Director as Raging Bull," in Film Comment (New York), January-February 1981.

Gentry, R., "Michael Chapman Captures Raging Bull in Black and White," in Millimeter (New York), February 1981.

Jenkins, Steve, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), February 1981.

Millar, Gavin, in Listener (London), 26 February 1981.

"Dialogue on Film: Robert De Niro," in American Film (Washington, D.C.), March 1981.

"Raging Bull Section" of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1981.

"Raging Bull Section" of Positif (Paris), April 1981.

Rinaldi, G., in Cineforum (Bergamo), April 1981.

Combs, Richard, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1981.

Sinyard, Neil, in Films Illustrated (London), May 1981.

Williams, A. L., in American Cinematographer (Los Angeles), May 1981.

Henry, M., in Casablanca (Madrid), June 1981.

Cook, Pam, "Raging Bull: Masculinity in Crisis," in Screen (London), September-October 1982.

Wood, Robin, "The Homosexual Subtext: Raging Bull, " in Australian Journal of Screen Theory (Kensington, New South Wales), no. 15–16, 1983.

Hemmeter, G. C. and T., "The Word Made Flesh: Language in Raging Bull, " in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), April 1986.

Bruce, Bryan, "Martin Scorsese: Five Films," in Movie (London), Winter 1986.

Lane, J., "Martin Scorsese and the Documentary Impulse," in Framework (London), no. 1, 1991.

Sitney, P. A., "Cinematic Election and Theological Vanity," in Raritan (New Brunswick, New Jersey), no. 2, 1991.

Librach, R. S., "The Last Temptation in Mean Streets and Raging Bull," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), no. 1, 1992.

Clements, Marcelle, "Martin Scorsese's Mortal Sins," in Esquire, vol. 120, no. 5, November 1993.

O'Neill, E.R., "'Poison'-ous Queers: Violence and Social Order," in Spectator (Los Angeles), vol. 15, no. 1, 1994.

Combs, Richard, "Hell Up in the Bronx," in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 5, no. 2, February 1995.

Borden, L., "Blood and Redemption," in Sight & Sound (London), vol. 5, February 1995.

Scorsese, Martin, "De Nero & Moi," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), no. 500, March 1996.

Mortimer, B., "Portraits of the Postmodern Person in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The King of Comedy," in Journal of Film and Video (Los Angeles), vol. 49, no. 1/2, 1997.

Thompson, David, "The Director as Raging Bull: Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Photograph?" in Film Comment (New York), vol. 34, no. 3, May-June 1998.

* * *

Martin Scorsese's telling of the story of Jake La Motta has given rise to a number of different, often conflicting, readings. For Scorsese himself, La Motta's trajectory from promising boxer to middleweight champion of the world to night-club performer is the story of "a guy attaining something and losing everything, and then redeeming himself." Such a reading is clearly reinforced by the quotation from St. John's gospel preceding the final credits, which tells of a man whose sight has been restored by Christ rebuking the Pharisees: "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." On this level, La Motta's life becomes a kind of spiritual odyssey of the kind encountered before in the work of Schrader and Scorsese, both separately and in collaboration one with another. As Scorsese describes La Motta: "He works on an almost primitive level, almost an animal level. And therefore he must think in a different way, he must be aware of certain things spiritually that we aren't, because our minds are too cluttered with intellectual ideas, and too much emotionalism. And because he's on that animalistic level, he may be closer to pure spirit."

Others have rejected such an approach as spurious, self-justificatory, high-flown theorizing and have condemned the film as endorsing macho values. On the other hand, there are those who completely invert this argument and, like Neil Sinyard, read Raging Bull as "a militantly feminist film" in that it "presents men at their most pointlessly repulsive and destructive. The effect of the film is to aim a pulverizing blow at male values."

Such contradictory readings and responses become more comprehensible if one considers the film's extraordinary style, however, in which it is frequently very difficult to locate any kind of authorial voice or attitude. Scorsese's presence is clearly there in the film's frequently stunning visuals, but what does he want us to think of La Motta? As Richard Combs puts it in the course of a long analysis of the film in Sight and Sound, Raging Bull "seems to have been made out of an impatience with all the usual trappings of cinema, with plot, psychology and an explanatory approach to character." Conversations, though intense in the extreme, are elliptical, muffled, barely heard. There are few "period" traces, and even fewer familiar faces. In spite of the opportunity offered by the trajectory of the real La Motta's life, Scorsese largely refuses to let the film arrange itself into a conventional rise-and-fall pattern, concentrating instead on simple, often highly elliptical chronological units, with some of La Motta's fights communicated solely by a still and a title. In all of these details the film differs markedly from the boxer's autobiography on which it is loosely based and which supplies "interpretation" and background detail in large amounts. What Scorsese has done, however, is to throw out all this "excess baggage," and to reveal La Motta's interior drama by means of a rigorous concentration on externals. In this respect, Raging Bull may be his most Bressonian film, in which, as Combs puts it, "the spirit is only evident in its absence."

Several critics, notable among them Robin Wood, have read a homosexual subtext in Raging Bull (and other Scorsese films for that matter). This is at its clearest in the scenes around the Janiro fight. Janiro's good looks have attracted the attention of La Motta's wife Vickie, and La Motta is determined to ruin them, although he jokes that he doesn't know whether to "fuck him or fight him." Sexual doubts also hover over a scene in which La Motta worries that he has "girl's hands," and inform much of the film's floridly sexual language. According to Wood, traces of repressed homosexuality in Raging Bull "exist threateningly close to the surface—to the film's conscious level of articulation—accounting for its relentless and near-hysterical intensity."

In the end, it has to be admitted that Raging Bull is a profoundly ambivalent film which refuses to fit easily into Scorsese's schema or into any straightforwardly feminist analysis either. But neither is it an unproblematic celebration of machismo. One of the few critics sensitive to the film's ambivalence is Pam Cook who argues that while it does indeed put masculinity in crisis it does not, for all its profoundly disturbing qualities, offer a radical critique of either masculinity or violence: "The film's attitude to violence is ambiguous. On one hand, it is validated as an essential component of masculinity, making possible resistance to a corrupt and repressive social system. On this level violence is seen as inseparable from desire, and is celebrated. On the other, the tragic scenario of Raging Bull demands that the hero be shown to be the guilty victim of his transgressive desires: his violence is so excessive, so self-destructive that it has to be condemned. . . .The tragic structure of Raging Bull has consequences for its view of masculinity: masculinity is put into crisis so that we can mourn its loss." In this reading La Motta's "fall" is not the result of some kind of innate guilt or "original sin" but intimately tied up with his social position as a member of the Italian-American immigrant community, a victim-hero desperate to improve the conditions of his existence by becoming a champion boxer but limited by a culture which at one and the same time offered power and success but insisted on the inferior status of Italian immigrants. According to Cook the film thus looks back to a time when the values of the Italian-American community were still current.

—Julian Petley