Aside from Mike Tyson - who, like LaMotta, would serve time in prison and enjoy an unlikely second career as an entertainer - there would be no one to rival the great heavyweights of decades past. No one knew it then, but when Raging Bull came along, boxing's long tumble from prominence as a mainstream sport had already begun. (There's also the sheer weirdness of hearing an 80-something LaMotta reciting Marlon Brando's 'I coulda been a contender' monologue from On the Waterfront as De Niro's 40-something LaMotta performs it onscreen.) The interviewer prompting him to speak on the track is his nephew Jason Lustig, and their familiarity prompts a shocking level of candor from LaMotta. He seemed happy to promote the film, even recording a commentary track for its Blu-Ray release. Nobody imagined that the Bronx Bull and Raging Bull would coexist for almost four decades. He pursued a sporadic career as an actor, with minute roles in The Hustler in 1961, but none of these brought him the sort of attention he craved.īecoming the subject of a cinematic portrait, even a deeply unflattering one of unimpeachable artistic merit, turned out to be a kind of a gift for him.

He had performed bad stand-up comedy in dodgy nightclubs, which he sometimes owned, and he served time on a chain gang after being convicted of introducing an underage girl to a man at one of his clubs. Twenty-six years had passed between LaMotta's retirement from the fight game and the release of Raging Bull. That's why they had to make their film about so much more. It's often cited as the best boxing film ever made, never mind that it devotes only about 10 percent of its 129-minute running time to fisticuffs, or that two of its primary creators, Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader, resisted star Robert De Niro's overtures to recruit them for the project because they just weren't interested in boxing. 4, behind Citizen Kane, The Godfather and Casablanca.

The American Film Institute's 2007 ranking of the 100 greatest American movies puts Raging Bull at No. Roger Ebert proclaimed it the best American film of the '80s. LaMotta published a memoir of that title in 1970, but it was Martin Scorsese's adaptation of the book, released late in 1980 to critical acclaim and commercial indifference, that became the lasting monument to his life. That obituary, of course, is Raging Bull. Jake LaMotta, the middleweight champion boxer famed for his ferocity in the ring in the 1940s and early '50s, died this week - nearly 40 years after his obituary was written. The obituary for Jake LaMotta was, in many ways, written by Robert De Niro's portrayal in Raging Bull.

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