Brutal and Honest

Rating: 10/10 (6 April 2006)

Since John Wayne and John Ford stopped making films, the greatest director/actor combination of the last 35 years is in my mind Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro.
In Raging Bull these two guys are within their element. An added dimension to Scorsese's direction and DeNiro's portrayal is that these are the people they know and grew up with. Raging Bull invokes a world of the past that isn't always pleasant, but is brutal and honest.
Jake LaMotta as middleweight champion of the world 1949-1951 may have had the hardest chin in boxing. He was a good puncher, but he had a marvelous ability to not only take a punch, but roll with it so it did less damage than thought. He fooled many an opponent like that and set them up for the kill.
Large parts of the boxing establishment was controlled by organized crime back in his days, the fathers of the people you'd later see DeNiro play in Goodfellas. You had to play ball with them or you went nowhere in the fight game. Jake compromised himself by agreeing to throw a fight to someone named Billy Fox in order to get a title shot at the middleweight crown. It seared his very soul in doing that.
One thing that wasn't covered in Raging Bull was the drama behind the title fight itself with Marcel Cerdan the man who LaMotta took the crown from. Cerdan was a national French hero, resistance fighter, lover of Edith Piaf and possessor of a murderous punch who had never been knocked out and only had sustained three losses in his career, two by disqualification. He was quite a brawler himself.
Cerdan broke his elbow in the first round and for 10 rounds literally held LaMotta off with one hand. When he failed to answer the bell for the 11th round, LaMotta got the title on a TKO. He was immediately promised a rematch and was on his way to the USA for that rematch when he was killed in a plane crash in the Azores. His death set off a national period of mourning in France.
LaMotta later admitted throwing the Fox fight to Congressional investigators and that with the win over the injured Cerdan cast a pall on his career and reputation. Sad because it was something he couldn't help. Jake the Bronx Bull certainly did have reason to rage.
DeNiro is something special. Watching this film you really think you are peeking into a heavenly newsreel highlights and lowlights of the life and career of Jake LaMotta. This film should be seen back to back with Somebody Up There Likes Me, the Rocky Graziano story that Paul Newman brought to the screen. Covers roughly the same era with the same quality.
Joe Pesci as DeNiro's manager/brother and Frank Vincent as the neighborhood wise guy would work together again and well with DeNiro and Scorsese. Cathy Moriarty gets her first notice as Jake's second wife Vicky who became a celebrity in her own right after Jake's boxing career was over.
Raging Bull is one of the finest boxing films ever done by a master director assembling a perfect cast to tell the tale of a bygone era.