“Raging Bull” is a drama of Mafia power, of professional sports and the media complex surrounding it—and the violent reign of organized crime.
The first movie première that I ever attended was the one for Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” at the Ziegfeld, in the fall of 1980, thanks to a friend with connections.
La Motta’s violence is essentially sexual; what arouses his fury toward Vickie is, above all, jealousy, the overwhelming anger at the idea of her having relations with, or even an attraction to, another man. Though he’s furiously motivated by lust, he’s also bound by the long-standing tradition that a boxer’s strength is sparked by abstinence—in effect, by sexual frustration.
But sex gets in the way: seeing Vickie at a night club in the company of the very gangsters who’ve been making overtures to La Motta, Joe approaches them aggressively and then starts a fight that lands him in trouble with the Mob boss, Tommy Como , who extorts a commitment from Joe to get La Motta to coöperate—which means to throw a fight for the benefit of gamblers.
The compact, compressed solidity with which La Motta’s unilluminated, impersonal character is composed makes him not a cipher or a void but a distillationof the worst of the particular world he lives in—and a paradoxical hero whose ability to win fame and fortune from those elements is itself an indictment of the world at large.
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