Raging Bull (Chartoff-Winkler Productions, United Artists, 1980)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, February 12) I watched a Turner Classic Movies showing of the 1980 film Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese’s biopic of otherwise virtually forgotten boxer Jake La Motta. It starred Robert De Niro as La Motta and is best known for two artistic decisions Scorsese and De Niro made. First, they shot the entire movie in black-and-white except for a few minutes of footage supposedly representing La Motta’s home movies of himself and his family. Second, they stopped production for two months in mid-shoot so De Niro could gain 40 pounds of weight to play the later, bloated La Motta after he literally ate his way out of his prizefighting career. The screenplay is credited to Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin (Mardik Martin also is in the film as a waiter at the Copacabaña when La Motta appears there), but in his memoir Final Cut Steven Bach, then co-head of production at United Artists (which financed and distributed the film), claimed the final script was actually written by Robert De Niro, though De Niro asked neither for credit from the Screen Writers’ Guild nor for any additional pay as a writer above what he was getting as star. Bach also said he argued with Scorsese over the director’s decision to open the film with a fat De Niro in 1964 preparing for his monologue act at the Copa, though in the end he conceded Scorsese had been right. Putting a scene with De Niro as the older, bloated La Motta got audience curiosity over De Niro’s “fat man” appearance over with right away before Scorsese and De Niro flashed back to La Motta’s boxing career. I’d seen this once before in the early 1980’s on a premium cable-TV channel and hadn’t particularly cared for it, though it’s been hyped as one of the greatest movies ever made. I still don’t like it all that much – it’s the sort of film I respect more than I actually enjoy – and ironically, though Bach says in his book that the reason he greenlighted the De Niro version of the film where he’d been reluctant to film the earlier drafts was it made Jake La Motta into a multidimensional human being, I still didn’t find him all that interesting. My late home-care client/roommate John Primavera was even more scathing about the film than I was; aside from his usual tirades against Italian-American directors like Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola for making films about the Mafia and thereby (as he saw it) engaging in race libel against all Italian-Americans, he remembered very well who Jake La Motta had been and specifically that he’d been barred from boxing in New York for throwing a fight. (That’s actually depicted in the film.)

La Motta emerges as little more than a barroom thug who becomes a boxer only because the ring offers him a chance to work out his aggressions and hatreds in a socially acceptable way. He marries a woman named Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) when she’s still underage. Then he regularly abuses her, first psychologically and then physically, until she finally leaves him and takes their three children with her. (They must have remained in contact, however, because the imdb.com “Trivia” page on this film describes the La Mottas watching a preliminary screening of the film and Jake asking Vickie, “Was I really that bad?” “No,” she said, “you were worse.”) Watching this film so shortly after having seen both versions of Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight (the 1956 live TV version and the 1962 film) was interesting, especially since both the feature-film version of Requiem and Raging Bull were shot in black-and-white. The difference was that in 1962 black-and-white movies were still a commonly accepted “thing” and major black-and-white movies like To Kill a Mockingbird were still being made. By 1980 black-and-white was considered a conscious artistic choice; almost no movies were still being made in it, and the black-and-white films available to directors and cinematographers like Scorsese and his D.P., Michael Chapman didn’t really look the same as black-and-white films from Hollywood’s heyday. (My husband Charles, who came home from work a half-hour or so before Raging Bull ended and said he’d never seen any of it before – he was just 18 when it was officially released and never caught up with it later – said he’d had the same problem with Woody Allen’s black-and-white Manhattan, too.) I remember reading that when Steven Spielberg’s black-and-white Schindler’s List was released in 1994, movie projectionists had trouble keeping it in focus because black-and-white film is thinner than color film. Raging Bull is a well-made film, but I never quite overcame my overall loathing for Jake La Motta and the sort of abusive, self-absorbed man he was.

One thing Scorsese knows how to do is use music in his films to reflect emotion and create a mood; the main themes for La Motta’s rise are operatic intermezzi by Pietro Mascagni – the familiar one from Cavalleria Rusticana and less common pieces from Guglielmo Ratcliff and Silvano. They’re heard in between pop songs of the period, many of which are in Italian – the imdb.com “Soundtrack Credits” page for Raging Bull lists 37 songs or song cues, far more than the 12 for an actual musical, Scorsese’s immediately previous non-documentary film, New York, New York (1977) – and though the songs are almost all heard in snippets, they create a rich tapestry of what the La Mottas would have actually been listening to during those years. (I liked the fact that Scorsese used a bit of the Ella Fitzgerald/Ink Spots cover of Ella Mae Morse’s star-making hit, “Cow Cow Boogie” – a rare instance of a Black artist covering a white one.) Overall, though, Raging Bull comes off as a film that was definitely Trying Too Hard. It encompasses the lower-class position boxing occupied in the athletic world (at least until Muhammad Ali came along and broadened its audience), racial politics (notably in La Motta’s years-long rivalry with the greatest Black fighter in his weight class, Sugar Ray Robinson), and the attempts of a working-class man to rise up in the world through his fists. It seems almost inevitable that La Motta would deliver, in his nightclub act, the famous “I coulda been a contenda” speech Budd Schulberg wrote for Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (1964) – a speech that strongly influenced Rod Serling when he wrote Requiem for a Heavyweight two years later. (One of the film’s most moving scenes is when La Motta expresses his regret that because he’s just a middleweight and not a heavyweight, he’ll never get to fight Joe Louis or the other best boxers of his time.) Ironically, La Motta was more than a “contenda,” he was actually middleweight champion for a brief period (he got the title defeating Marcel Cerdan, France’s great white hope and the great love of Edith Piaf’s life, and beat another French fighter who took Cerdan’s place in a rematch after Cerdan’s death in a plane crash, only to lose it to Robinson in their third fight against each other).Then he retired and opened a nightclub in Miami until his spectacular fall from grace and his incarceration for pimping out a girl who turned out to be 14. A lot of people considered Raging Bull to be one of the greatest movies ever made – I even remember an article which called it the best film of the 1980’s (I’d give that honor to Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters) – but, though I respect it and what Scorsese and De Niro were trying to do, I just don’t care for it all that much.