The 30th Anniversary Edition of Raging Bull is a reminder of the greatness of director Martin Scorsese in his peak years and of Robert DeNiro when given challenging roles. The two-disc set includes a DVD and a Blu-ray, which both place the gorgeous black and white cinematography in powerful relief. Raging Bull probably didn’t look as beautiful during its first run in theaters 30 years ago.
Raging Bull continues to stand as the greatest boxing film, starting with the sharp angles from which Scorsese captured the matches. Based on the biography of the 1940s-‘50s middleweight champion Jake LaMotta, Raging Bull implicitly takes the whole milieu to task. The backstage fixing and Mob ties are inherent to the story. What’s striking about Raging Bull is its naked depiction of boxing as a blood sport shorn of all romanticism. The violence easily overspills the ropes and into the audience and the private lives of the central characters.
Call it the anti-Rocky. Although Jake LaMotta and Rocky Balboa shared ethnic New York backgrounds and the will to be contenders, Scorsese’s film never idealizes his protagonist or the sport of boxing. LaMotta is no hero but a paranoid, self-destructive maniac raging against existence itself. DeNiro, the then-unknown Joe Pesci (as Jake’s brother) and the supporting cast are superb all around, both in delivering the dialogue and in body language. Scorsese’s compositions capture the claustrophobia of New York tenement life and his use of sound echoes the punchy disorientation of a boxer pummeled in the ring.
Scorsese’s recently taped commentary track has many illuminating moments, including the importance of improvisation in many of the film’s scenes. The fights, however, were carefully storyboarded. Shooting the boxing scenes required 10 weeks of filming. Only 10 minutes were used.
