Raging Bull

During TCM's 100th anniversary salute to United Artists back in September, one of the movies the ran was Raging Bull. Not having done a post on it here before, I decided to DVR it so that I could do that post.

Robert De Niro stars as Jake La Motta, who at the beginning of the movie is a forty-something former world middleweight boxing champion who is now rather older and fatter, and doing a stage show in New York. Flash back to the beginning of La Motta's career....

Jake is toiling away in the lower rungs of boxing, not particularly getting anywhere. But Jake's brother Joey (Joe Pesci in the role that made him a star) has an acquaintance in the Mafia, Salvy (Frank Vincent), and tries to get Salvy to arrange some bigger fights for Jake. This happen, and eventually Jake is able to fight for the world championship (of course, World War II was going on at the time so how much of a world championship it was is debatable), as well as the first two in a series of matches with Sugar Ray Robinson, widely considered one of the greatest pound-for-pound fighters of all time.

Along the way, Jake meets the lovely Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) and marries her, although it's a troubled marriage. Jake is both insanely jealous, and has a tendency to violence outside the ring as well as inside. At one point, things get so bad that Jake accuses Vickie of having had sex wth Joey (who has a wife and kids of his own).

Jake continues to box, and in the late 1940s gets another shot at the world championship, before ultimately ending his career with another bad loss against Robinson. His career now over, he doesn't quite know what to do with himself, opening a nightclub down in Miami and trading off his fame. But his impulsive behavior is going to catch up with him in multiple ways....

Raging Bull is one of those movies that winds up on all the lists of "greatest movies of all time", but that I find myself wondering whether it quite belongs there. This is not to say that I disliked the movie, or that it's at all bad. In fact, all of the performances are quite good. It's more that the movie is praised so highly that it's easy to go into it with expectations that are too high.

The other thing to note about Raging Bull is the black-and-white cinematography (with the exception of La Motta's home movies, which are in color). It's excellent and gives the movie a distinctive look that I don't think it would have had if director Martin Scorsese had made the movie in color. There's a grittiness instead of the antiseptic vibrancy of too many color movies about the more recent past. The cinematography also extends to the fight sequences, which are quite stylish, if to my eye unrealistic.

Watch Raging Bull for yourself, and you may well have the common opinion that I didn't that it's one of the greatest movies of all time.