12 Movies Challenge: 'Raging Bull'

by Julian Spivey

Photo: United Artists

One of the biggest shocks when watching the American Film Institute’s updated 100 Greatest American Films broadcast in 2007 was the placement of director Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” (1980) at No. 4 on the list. “Raging Bull” had been No. 24 on the original AFI list 10 years prior. It wasn’t the most significant movement on the list – John Ford’s “The Searchers” (1956), a pivotal film in Scorsese’s life, moved from No. 96 to No. 12.

“Raging Bull” was the highest-placed film on the AFI 100 list I hadn’t seen before this project of watching the 10 highest-placed films on the list I’d never seen.

I’d wanted to see “Raging Bull” for years, but the No. 4 greatest American film ever is such a lofty position that I dreaded watching it. What would it say about me if I didn’t find it deserving?

Now that I’ve seen “Raging Bull,” I can admit it’s a great film, but I also believe it’s not the fourth greatest American film ever made (everybody has their own list). It is a terrific character study of a horrible man whom some might find heroic, something it has in common with “The Searchers.”

Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) is an anti-hero. He’s also a complete loser. He’s not so much a loser in the boxing ring, where he worked hard and fought his way up to being the middleweight champion of the world, but a loser of a man who can’t let his rage and jealousy get out of his way.

If you watch “Raging Bull” and come out of it thinking LaMotta is a heroic figure, I believe you’ve watched the film wrong, or it says something disturbing about you.

The film is based on LaMotta’s 1970 memoir, Raging Bull: My Story, which tells of his rise and fall in boxing and the rage and jealousy that ran rampant through his life. It didn’t tell of his relationship with his brother, Joey, which was a happy accident of a find by screenwriter Paul Schrader.

A sweet spot of Scorsese, De Niro and Schrader is horrible men – perhaps their finest film was “Taxi Driver” four years before this. But the difference between De Niro’s Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver” and LaMotta in “Raging Bull” is that LaMotta was a real person, and not only that, but a consultant on the film. Amazingly, LaMotta was open enough about his character and life to let this story be told in its brutality.

There are three primary figures in “Raging Bull,” LaMotta, Joey (Joe Pesci), and Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), the wife of LaMotta and the primary reason for his jealousies to bubble over, and none of them are likable. However, you ultimately find sympathy for Vickie and maybe even somewhat for Joey through how LaMotta treats them. 

The performances, particularly by De Niro (who won Best Actor for the role at the Oscars) and Pesci (this being his breakthrough role), are outstanding. You believe them every second of the way as the overly-masculine, Italian brutes they are.

Outside of the terrific performances, a highlight of the film is the brutally horrific boxing scenes that were filmed unlike the way you’d see in most boxing films. Instead of filming the bouts from a spectator’s viewpoint from outside of the ring, Scorsese brings the camera right into the scrum, using it as the POV of the fighter doing the punching. This leads to incredibly close-ups of LaMotta and the boxers he’s fighting being hammered and abused by every single hit, with sweat and blood flying everywhere. The brutality of these scenes is supposedly one of the reasons that led Scorsese to film “Raging Bull” in black and white, as the blood spurting may have been too much for audiences had it been filmed in color. It may have also taken away from the beauty of the battle.

“Raging Bull” is a powerful study of a bad man. It’s not a fun watch, but it’s a stellar film.