"Raging Bull" still raging, 45 years on

The story of Jake LaMotta's rise and fall is compelling

In the 45 years since Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” was first projected on movie screens across America — December 19, 1980 — it hasn’t calmed down one bit.

Though the film opens with beautiful classical music, a symphonic intermezzo (write that down, you learned something today!) titled “Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana by Pietro Mascagni,” it’s about the only thing beautiful you’ll see in the film’s violent first ten minutes, which opens with the film’s subject, middleweight contender Jake LaMotta suffering his first defeat, flooring the “winner” Jimmy Reeves three times in the final round but seeing Reeves be saved by the bell.

Reeves is still stunned, sitting on his stool, when the referee comes over and lifts his arm. LaMotta, played brilliantly by Academy Award winner Robert DeNiro, worries first that his robe isn’t on right. It’s as if he expects bad things to happen. And they do.

Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull" still shocks and stings

That scene is the first indication that bad luck is going to follow LaMotta throughout his life (and the film) and the chaos that erupts outside the ring — and in it — after the questionable decision just foreshadows the story that unfolds before us over the next couple hours.

Next, we see LaMotta at his kitchen table still fighting, this time with the first of his several wives. There’s a nasty argument between the two about a steak, LaMotta tips the table over, the screaming in the apartment is so loud, the neighbors are hollering up at him. Then Joey, Jake’s younger brother and manager, played superbly by Joe Pesci, arrives, sort of like a referee. The angry wife, hollering and screaming, heads off the bedroom and Joey and Jake have a quiet talk at the table.

Then Jake goads Joey into punching him as hard as he can in the face. It’s a difficult scene to watch — Scorsese’s intent — that show that unless LaMotta is in some kind of pain, whether from another man’s fist or from his self-inflicted paranoia, Jake LaMotta just doesn’t ever feel right.

If you thought Scorsese’s other films, “Goodfellas” or “Taxi Driver” or “Mean Streets” were violent — and they are — “Raging Bull” focuses on the external and internal violence of a life lived in constant pain, either inflicted or afflicted. And as painful as it is to watch, it’s just as compelling viewing, thanks to the brilliance of DeNiro and Pesci, their souls linked in a battle with life, each other, heritage, brotherly love and devotion.

Though one LaMotta quality is certainly admirable; he wants to win the World Middleweight crown without the aid of the Mafia, he has his principles, you might say, the relentless pressure to keep on winning is driving him and everyone around him, nuts.

As he watches the boxing powers that be steer other, less deserving fighters to shots at the title, LaMotta is left out. He and his peer Sugar Ray Robinson were so ahead of the pack that nobody wanted to fight them. So they ended up fighting one another an unheard of six times. LaMotta won the first fight, Robinson the rest.

The fight scenes are carefully, realistically and of course, violently done. You feel the punches this not particularly likeable man endures and how somehow, he stubbornly prevails. For a while. But the price he — and everyone around him — has paid makes you question if it was all worth it.

The film traces LaMotta’s eventual climb to the middleweight crown and the wars he fought in the ring and in his home with his second wife, Vicki (later a Playboy centerfold) so that when he finally does get the title belt, defeating France’s Marcel Cerdan, who injured a shoulder in the bout and had to fight one-armed, it’s not what he dreamed of. It didn’t change his life or his personality. He won one more fight, that’s all.

Uneasily, we sit and watch his life unravel, the arrests, then his surprising rebound into a nightclub comedian/actor as the film concludes, fat, battle-scarred but still there. It’s not exactly a happy Hollywood ending but certainly, gratefully, it’s a redemptive one for him and the audience.

Like attending a boxing match, the film “Raging Bull” is not for the faint of heart. It took courage for Scorsese to make such a film and it takes some doing to sit and watch it. Some lives are like that. There are struggles and violence and disappointments and bitterness and betrayals. In a way, Jake LaMotta lived several lives and Scorsese’s film, thanks to the brilliant DeNiro, suggests that.

Years ago, I had a chance to chat over the phone with the real LaMotta one evening. He was promoting the film and was hilarious, riffing on his ex-wife appearing in Playboy: “She used to say, ‘Jake, I got nothin’ to wear,’” on Sugar Ray Robinson: “I fought Sugar Ray Robinson so much it’s a wonder I didn’t get diabetes” and ultimately, his ex-wife’s reaction to the film.

“So I asks her, “Hey, Vickie, what did you think of the film?” he said. “It wasn’t like that, was it?”

“No, Jake,” she says. “It was worse.” And then Jake LaMotta, a survivor, laughed.