Cinema: Animal House

RAGING BULL

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Screenplay by Paul Schroder and

Mardik Martin

Now, sometimes, at night, when I think back, I feel like I'm looking at an old black-and-white movie of myself. Why it should be black-and-white I don't know, but it is. Not a good movie, either, jerky, with gaps in it, a string of poorly lit sequences, some of them with no beginning and some with no end ... And almost all of it happens at night, as if I lived my whole life at night.

—Jake La Motta in his autobiography

Raging Bull, 1970

What Jake saw in a nostalgic nightmare, Martin Scorsese has put on the screen. The Bronx Bull butted his way to the middleweight championship of boxing in 1949. He "fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times I got diabetes." He played rope-a-dope with the Mob. He ballooned to 210 lbs. (from 160) within a year of retiring, was convicted on a morals charge involving a 14-year-old prostitute, and made a comeback of sorts as a road-show Rocky Graziano. Now 59, this sacred monster is canonized and cauterized in Scorsese's searing black and white.

La Motta was an animal, a bull in the ring and a pig outside, and Scorsese is true to both Jakes. The boxing sequences (which amount to barely a dozen minutes of the movie's two hours plus) are as violent, controlled, repulsive and exhilarating as anything in the genre. Scorsese layers the sound track with grunts and screams, animal noises that seem to emanate from hell's zoo. The camera muscles into the action, peering from above, from below, from the combatant's point of view, panning 360° as a doomed fighter spins toward the canvas. Smoke, sweat, flesh and blood become Jackson Pollock abstractions as they pound home the essential blood lust of those sweet sciences, prizefighting and moviemaking.

The ring is where Scorsese's art is most alive, because it is where Jake (Robert De Niro) lives, where he can do battle on equal terms, playing by hard men's rules. It is where Jake's life finally achieves meaning when he wins the title and is embraced by his idol, Joe Louis —and where the paradigmatic club fighter loses the bout, the title and several quarts of blood in his 1951 match with the stylish Robinson. Indeed, Jake has lost everything but the pride that propels him over to the new champ's corner to boast, "You never knocked me down, Ray!"