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Raging Bull
December 19 1980
(Page 1)
AFTER SEEING "Raging Bull" in New York three weeks ago, I wrote that it is one of the best American films of the year, a superb creation of the finest acting-directing team in the United States, Robert De Niro and director Martin Scorsese.
Since, friends who have seen the picture came away admiring it but pointing out some flaws. The major objection seems to be that the film, which tells the story of brutish '40s boxer Jake La Motta, doesn't have a clean, straight-forward narrative line. (It's a problem that has been noted in the other four Scorsese-De Niro films, "Who's That Knocking at My Door?", "Mean Streets," "Taxi Driver," and "New York, New York")
Even granting this objection - which I'm not quick to do - "Raging Bull" still stands as a superior achievement of film and acting art. Frankly, in 1980 you could take most Hollywood films and throw them in a blender and it wouldn't make that much difference how you reassembled them. Safe and boring describes most Hollywood products, with major stars selling their artistic souls in the name of sequels and big-budget action.
What "Raging Bull" does so well is venture into the dark side of the human animal, in this case, the animal that was La Motta, the onetime middleweight champion who has admitted throwing a championship fight and who, in his private life, was a bullying louse to his first and second wives.
"Raging Bull" is a portrait of an animal, and it undoubtedly will be too violent, too dark, too ugly for many moviegoers, who can take revenge into the lighter side of human nature in "Nine to Five" and "Seems Like Old Times."
But if you like a movie down-and-dirty, "Raging Bull" is it. Filmed in black-and white, and shockingly well acted by De Niro, "Raging Bull" suggests that if you are looking for the source of evil in the world, you don't have to look any further than yourself. It's inside you or it isn't. And it comes out or it doesn't.
With Jake La Motta, according to Scorsese and his screenwriters, it came out a lot. De Niro's La Motta is a paranoid bully, who drops his first wife like a hot rock after spotting a blond teen-age vision in a white bathing suit (newcomer Cathy Moriarty in a sizzling screen debut) at a neighborhood Bronx swimming pool.
De Niro's sexy pickup scene with Moriarty-one of the most supercharged scenes in the movie-is filled with the same kind of focused energy that De Niro exhibited when he picked up another young blond woman-in-white (Cybill Shepherd) in "Taxi Driver."
After the pickup scene, "Raging Bull" moves along two tracks, as De Niro battles his opponents and mobsters in the ring and his new young wife at home.
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