10 / 10
Official trailer
Raging Bull is the Martin Scorsese-directed biographical drama based on the life of middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta. Scorsese directed. Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin wrote the screenplay, adapting LaMotta’s 1970 autobiography Raging Bull: My Story (co-written with Joseph Carter and Peter Savage).
Robert De Niro plays LaMotta in the role that earned him his second Academy Award. Joe Pesci plays Joey LaMotta, Jake’s brother and manager. Cathy Moriarty plays Vickie LaMotta, Jake’s second wife. Frank Vincent plays Salvy Batts, a local mob associate.
Nicholas Colasanto plays Tommy Como, the local crime boss. Theresa Saldana plays Lenore LaMotta, Jake’s first wife. The plot follows LaMotta’s boxing career from 1941 through his 1956 retirement, his marriages, his fights inside and outside the ring, and his eventual collapse into nightclub-emcee semi-obscurity.
Few films grip me the way this one does, and it does it with a man I’d cross the street to avoid. De Niro makes LaMotta cruel, jealous and self-destructive, and Scorsese still makes me care what becomes of him. That’s the whole trick of the film, and I don’t think anybody has pulled it off better.
The film made approximately twenty-three million dollars in initial 1980 release on an eighteen million dollar budget.
The commercial performance was disappointing. The critical reception was mixed at release. Later reassessment has been overwhelmingly positive. The film received eight Academy Award nominations and won two (Best Actor for De Niro and Best Film Editing for Thelma Schoonmaker). Multiple critical surveys across later decades have named Raging Bull the greatest American film of the 1980s.
The 2007 American Film Institute revised list placed Raging Bull fourth among all American films of all time. The film is consistently cited as Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece and among the most accomplished biographical productions in American cinema.
The De Niro Transformation
Robert De Niro gained approximately sixty pounds during the production to play LaMotta in his post-retirement period.
The weight gain was real. The production was halted for four months while De Niro consumed enormous quantities of food across Europe to achieve the physical transformation. The early scenes (boxing-career LaMotta) were filmed at De Niro’s normal weight after extensive boxing training. The later scenes (retired LaMotta) were filmed at the increased weight. The audience experiences the character’s physical decline directly because the performer underwent the actual physical change.
The technique has become a much-cited example of method-acting commitment in American cinema. De Niro’s transformation set the template that later performers would emulate (Christian Bale’s preparation for The Machinist 2004 and The Fighter 2010, Matthew McConaughey for Dallas Buyers Club 2013, others). The original was Raging Bull. Physical preparation can carry character work that conventional makeup and prosthetics couldn’t produce. The audience reads the weight gain as character truth because the weight gain is real.
The Oscar was deserved on the performance alone. People talk about the weight so much that I think they forget how good he is in the lean early scenes, coiled and paranoid and dangerous in every room he walks into. The weight is the headline. The acting is what makes this a 10 for me.
For Writers
Physical commitment in performance can carry character work that other techniques can’t deliver. De Niro’s actual weight gain produces a different effect than prosthetic makeup would have achieved. The lesson applies to writing. Some character work requires the writer’s actual engagement with the material instead of imagined or researched approximation. Live in the place. Do the job. Talk to the people. The writing that emerges from direct experience reads differently than the writing that emerges from research.
The Black-and-White Cinematography
The film was photographed in black-and-white by Michael Chapman. The choice was deliberate. Scorsese has explained in multiple interviews that the black-and-white photography served multiple purposes: it gave the film a 1940s-period feel, it separated the boxing sequences from the conventions of color sports cinema, and it allowed the visual emphasis to fall on faces and physical movement instead of on color spectacle. The black-and-white commitment was unusual for major 1980 American studio productions.
The cinematography also includes specific home-movie sequences shot in color 16mm and integrated as flashback material. The contrast between the black-and-white narrative footage and the color home-movie material produces specific effects throughout the film. The audience reads the color sequences as memory instead of as present action. The black-and-white reads as the present-tense reality.
The structural choice supports the film’s specific argument about how LaMotta remembers his own life. Cinematography can carry temporal and emotional content that the script doesn’t have to verbalize.
The visual tone tells the audience what kind of material they’re watching at each moment. Shooting in black-and-white is the best call Scorsese made here, in my view. The color home movies hit me hard because they look so warm and ordinary next to everything else, and that contrast makes LaMotta’s memories feel like a version of his life he’d prefer to believe.
For Writers
Visual tone can carry temporal and emotional content that the script doesn’t have to verbalize. Raging Bull uses black-and-white for present action and color 16mm for memory. The reader (or viewer) absorbs the temporal information without conscious recognition. The lesson applies to prose. Sentence structure, paragraph rhythm, and tense choices can carry similar information. Build the writing’s specific patterns to match the content’s specific tones. The reader will absorb the rhythm as meaning.
The Boxing Sequences
The film’s boxing sequences are among the most influential individual craft elements in American cinema. Scorsese and Michael Chapman developed techniques: the cameras inside the ring during fights, the multiple speed changes within single sequences, the sound design that includes both crowd noise and impact effects, and the editing rhythms that vary with the dramatic content of each round. The sequences aren’t generic sports cinema. The sequences are specific to LaMotta’s interior experience during each fight.
Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing of the boxing sequences earned her the Oscar for Best Film Editing.
The technical craft includes decisions about when to use slow motion, when to use rapid cutting, when to use sustained close-ups, and when to break the conventional sports-coverage geography. Each fight has its own editing approach matched to its narrative function. The Sugar Ray Robinson fights, the title-shot fights, and the closing decline-period fights all work at different editing tempos.
Editing can carry character work that the boxing alone can’t deliver. Every fight in this film is about what LaMotta is doing to himself, and Schoonmaker’s cutting makes me feel it in my gut. I think these are the best fight scenes ever put on film, and I don’t expect to see them topped.
For Writers
Sequence pacing should match the dramatic content of the sequence instead of following a uniform default. Raging Bull’s boxing sequences are edited at different tempos according to what each fight is doing for the character. The lesson is that pacing is interpretive. The writing’s rhythm should match what the writing is doing emotionally. Slow down for the moments that require contemplation. Speed up for the moments that require kinetic experience. Match the tempo to the content.
Craft Note
The closing dressing-room sequence is the film’s most economical thematic statement. LaMotta, in his retirement-period nightclub work, sits before a mirror in his dressing room rehearsing a monologue for his act. The monologue is Marlon Brando’s “I could have been a contender” speech from On the Waterfront (1954). LaMotta delivers Brando’s lines with sustained physical commitment. The audience reads the recognition directly. LaMotta is performing someone else’s lines about a fighter whose brother and own choices destroyed him.
The sequence closes the film by acknowledging that LaMotta has spent his retirement years rehearsing other people’s words about his own life.
He can’t speak directly about what happened. He has to borrow Brando’s speech. A single closing sequence can deliver thematic content that the film’s preceding material had been building toward. The closing is a much-quoted final scene in American cinema.
Does Raging Bull still hold up?
10/10, and I don’t have a complaint worth making. Scorsese is at the top of his game, De Niro earned his second Oscar, and Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing earned its own. The black-and-white photography, the fights and that closing dressing-room monologue are permanent parts of American cinema. The one warning I’d give is that LaMotta is hard company, and some people won’t want to spend a whole film with him. To me it’s the best American film of the 1980s. Watch it, and then read about how it was made.
