RAGING BULL

MARTIN SCORSESE FINALLY connected with Raging Bull in hospital, bleeding internally and close to death. Particularly horrendous cocaine had clashed with the prescription medication in his system and, having coughed up blood and blacked out, here he was, swiftly gaining perspective. For years he hadn’t tuned into the project. Now he did. “I was [Lamotta],” he later said of the revelation, relating to the boxer’s anger issues, paranoia and self-destruction. “I’d make the movie about me.” And the opening frames speak volumes.

Raging Bull’s title sequence has Robert De Niro’s Lamotta shadowboxing in his leopard-print robe, all but dressed as an animal, stalking the ring, the ropes caging him, imprisoning him. The arena shrouded in smoke, he’s surrounded by thousands of people, but he’s alone, fighting himself, fighting the world. “I was always angry,” Scorsese said of his former troubles, “throwing glasses, provoking people, really unpleasant to be around.” Raging Bull may tell of Lamotta’s life, but it was Scorsese’s soul.

The film was planned to be in colour, until Scorsese’s trusted friend, legendary British director Michael Powell, watched 8mm footage of De Niro training and said the red boxing gloves were a distraction, leading Scorsese to go black-and-white, in line with the televised matches he saw as a kid. The opening was specifically inspired by a book Scorsese had seen of black-and-white photographs of boxers preparing for matches. “I saw a few where the fighter seemed to be standing in the ring by himself,” he said. “It almost was like a ghostly image, that had the spirit of the gladiator, the warrior. Or the spirit of just a human being struggling.”

The sequence was shot in a Culver City studio in June 1979, cranked out at 96 frames a second for slowmotion elegance: boxing as ballet. In contrast, title designer Dan Perri presented the title as one word, RAGINGBULL, to express Lamotta’s speed and drive, in red to indicate violence. As scripted by Scorsese, it was to be soundtracked by Louis Jordan’s ‘Stone Cold Dead In The Market’, a chirpy 1946 number about a woman killing her physically abusive husband; the use of ‘Intermezzo’ from Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana opera was unplanned. It was to be deployed throughout the film, but when Scorsese watched the opening in the edit, a button was pushed and ‘Intermezzo’ piped up. “I said, ‘That obviously works very well for the beginning,’” he remembered.

Yes; such mournful majesty fits the scene like, well, a glove. Scorsese sets out his stall here: this is a film about a man forever fighting, trying to come to terms with himself. In its opening, the director gives Lamotta the grace that few others might have done.

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