Raging Bull

Boxing shot from inside the ring

Martin Scorsese has said more than once that he does not like boxing. He nonetheless shot the most imitated ring scenes in cinema. They take up about ten minutes of the film and needed almost two months of filming in the spring of 1979, at the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles and then on a stage in Culver City. Cinematographer Michael Chapman keeps his camera between the ropes, where a third boxer would stand, and every fight gets its own visual treatment. The footwork was planned like dance steps. Black and white, slow motion, photographers' flashbulbs, blood and sweat flying: the film is not after the realism of a broadcast, it is after what the fighter feels.

De Niro, a real boxer

To prepare, Robert De Niro trained with Jake LaMotta himself, assisted by trainer Al Silvani, at the Gramercy Gym in New York. LaMotta later said his pupil could have ranked among the twenty best middleweights of all time. De Niro fought three amateur bouts in Brooklyn and won two. Production then shut down for almost four months while the actor went from 66 to 97 kg to play LaMotta after his career. He won the Academy Award for best actor in 1981. Real boxers appear in the cast: Eddie Mustafa Muhammad, WBA light heavyweight world champion in 1980, plays Billy Fox, and former heavyweight Coley Wallace plays Joe Louis.

The real fights, recreated

The film follows LaMotta's career from 1941 to 1951 and recreates his actual bouts. On 16 June 1949 in Detroit he took the world middleweight title from Frenchman Marcel Cerdan, who injured a shoulder and did not come out for the tenth round. On 13 September 1950, behind on points against another Frenchman, Laurent Dauthuille, he knocked him out with thirteen seconds left in the fifteenth round. On 14 February 1951 in Chicago, Sugar Ray Robinson took the belt back when the referee stopped the fight in the thirteenth round, the bout known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre; LaMotta never went down. A boxer will recognise the style: constant pressure, a chin that takes everything, body work and no interest in slipping punches.

Reception

Released in the United States on 19 December 1980, Raging Bull grossed 23.4 million dollars on an 18 million budget, a modest return blamed on its violence and a poorly handled release. Critics caught up fast. Eight Oscar nominations, two wins (De Niro and Thelma Schoonmaker's editing), entry into the National Film Registry in 1990, its first year of eligibility, fourth greatest American film of all time for the American Film Institute in 2007, and a 92% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.