“Mr. Scorsese, You Are an Artist”

Did they know what they had? No, probably not. Their only hint came at a screening for United Artists executives in New York. Andy Albeck, the rather unlikely head of the company, was present. He was a ramrod-stiff man who spoke with a sometimes hard-to-decipher European accent. A U.A. lifer, he was a number cruncher who had previously had nothing to do with the creative side of the business, but who had good relationships with Transamerica, the insurance conglomerate that owned the studio. Raging Bull was due to be released in New York, L.A., and Toronto within a few days of Heaven’s Gate, in November 1980. Albeck had yet to see Michael Cimino’s film, but he had good reason to suspect that it carried the potential to doom his tenure at U.A., perhaps even the entire company’s future. In any case, the Raging Bull screening reached its conclusion, and total silence ensued—no smattering of applause, no buzz of approval. This is typical of such screenings: everyone waits for power to speak its piece. Which it now did. Albeck rose, marched up the aisle, shook the director’s hand, and said, “Mr. Scorsese, you are an artist.”

Scorsese’s father overheard him, and that meant as much to the director as the accolade itself, for his father had been skeptical about the film—especially its scenes of domestic violence. That was something this stern and righteous man had schooled his children to avoid.

So, in a Christmas season, Raging Bull went forth to mixed reviews and modest business. Pauline Kael, who was often right about small matters but equally often wrong about the large ones (the number of great movies she trashed, the number of dubious ones she praised, is astonishing), wrote that “Scorsese is putting his unmediated obsessions on the screen, trying to turn raw, pulp power into art, by removing it from the particulars of observation and narrative. He loses the low-life entertainment values of prizefight films; he aestheticizes pulp and kills it.”

This is nonsense. Aside from the fact that Raging Bull’s boxing sequences remain the most powerful ever shot, the film demands to be read, in part, as a kind of critical gloss on the boxing genre. It touches, for example, on La Motta’s relationship with the Mob—the usual central conflict in fight films—but only lightly. It more than lightly touches on the brutality of the sport, but does not argue, even implicitly, that it should be banned or cleaned up. It has its religious implications—there are moments when La Motta can be seen as a martyr (a few drips of his blood on a ring rope), but they can easily be missed in the fury and flurry. In truth, Raging Bull remains sui generis. The long writing process and the concentration of its direction focus our attention on thoughtless, heedless behavior in a way that few movies do. Its stripped-down behavioralism, its refusal to explain or justify anyone’s actions, remains close to unique in American movie history. If the film has any roots they are in Italian neo-realism, which, come to think of it, was all the rage—not least with the young Marty Scorsese—at the same moment the real La Motta asserted his claim on our attention.

I had not reviewed or even seen the movie in the early days of its release. But it began winning prizes from the critics’ groups and then it got eight Academy Award nominations. More important, it was getting buzz; it was all anyone in cinematic circles was talking about in New York. So, at last, I checked it out—and became permanently enamored with it, as so many people have over the years. Raging Bull was not, and never became, a populist success, as sometimes happens when the public, for reasons of its own, overrides mixed or even hostile reviews. (See The Blind Side, a recent example.) But even people who know almost nothing about movies understand that, whatever relationship Raging Bull has with genre tradition, in its hyper-reality it is above and beyond—or maybe below and beyond—anything studio-made in the sound era. (There are several silent films, oddly enough, that share something of its look and concerns.)

It’s possible, and wildly unfair, that De Niro won his Oscar for his prodigious eating. It’s possible, and wildly unfair, that Scorsese did not win best director—it went to Robert Redford for his bland, bourgeois Ordinary People—because he was a Hollywood outsider. It was wildly fair that Thelma Schoonmaker won the Oscar for her editing on her first try as a nominee. The Academy had nothing against her and her work was highly visible, especially in the boxing scenes.

These honors, naturally, say nothing about the way Raging Bull has taken its place in history—all those placements on those all-time greatest-movies lists that people are always drawing up. I asked Schoonmaker if anyone at the time entertained the thought that they were doing something special and she laughed. “No,” she said, “it’s always, ‘Let’s see what it will be like in 40 or 50 years.’” We are nearing the low end of that span and Raging Bull’s hold on us is undiminished.