Film: Raging Bull
FILM HARRY MOUNT RAGING BULL (Amazon Prime)
Forty years ago, Raging Bull won Oscars for Best Actor (Robert De Niro) and Best Film Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker). The Academy should have given two more to the nominees, Joe Pesci and Martin Scorsese.
The film hasn’t dated. The violence is terrifyingly gripping; particularly outside the ring, where Jake Lamotta (De Niro) attacks his poor wife, Vicky (Cathy Moriarty), with a bored, slow determination – much more shocking, and less familiar, than bloody boxing matches.
It’s also a reminder of how funny De Niro – recently accused of doing rubbish new films to pay for his divorce – can be. He’d already worked on his violent Italian-american in Mean Streets (1973), The Godfather Part II (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976). He perfects the part in the story of Jake Lamotta (1922-2017), world middleweight champion (1949-1951).
There isn’t much of a plot. Lamotta becomes pathologically jealous of his second wife, Vicky, beats her up and beats up his brother Joey (Joe Pesci). His personal life is cut with his fights – taking a dive for a mobster, becoming middleweight champion, losing his title to the great Sugar Ray Robinson and moving up to light heavyweight.
Throughout the film, there are flashforwards to old Lamotta in decline, telling jokes as a stand-up (pictured) and going to jail in 1958 for introducing men at his Miami club to an underage girl.
So far, so routine. But De Niro brings the film – and Lamotta – to glorious, horrific, funny life in his dual portrayal of the young, thin boxer and the middleaged fat one. Everything he does is watchable, down to the tiniest details. He
speaks and moves in a unique De Niro language. He repeats lines, swaggers and adjusts his waistband. But, miraculously, he isn’t hammy. While carrying out all this business, he’s understated, happily pausing for ages without it being the sort of stagey, ‘Aren’t I so still?’ pause that Mark Rylance specialises in.
The older Lamotta – De Niro fattened up on a gastronomic tour of Europe – doesn’t just look different from his younger self. He is different: he’s funny and newly relaxed, even if physically and psychologically ruined by the effects of fame. Despite the violence, he is poignant as he surveys the ruins.
Joe Pesci also specialises in funny repetition (perfected later by him in the Goodfellas ‘Funny how?’ scene) – and bouts of extreme violence. But, with his nasal, high-pitched, quickfire, whaddyawhaddya delivery, he is different from De Niro; a foil, not an imitation.
Scorsese holds all this together, making everything seem natural while being so innovative.
It could have looked pretentious, filmed in black and white – particularly when the thoroughly enjoyable Rocky films were then being made in full, blood-soaked Technicolor. But the De Niro-pesci conversations are so natural, helped by the Paul Schrader/ Mardik Martin screenplay, that it never feels art-housey. Scorsese’s casting of old Italian men is perfect – including his father, Charles, as an Italian card-player.
The same goes for the slow-motion romantic interludes, the black-and-white stills and the colour home-movie shots of New York rooftops. These touches would have bombed if they’d looked contrived.
Instead, they chime perfectly with the film’s melancholy, bittersweet feel – deepened by Mascagni’s Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana.
Scorsese is the king of ItalianAmerican Manhattan nostalgia.
RADIO VALERIE GROVE
From 1985 to 1994, there was a memorable series on Radio 4 called
Never the Same Again.
In it, Jenni Mills talked to families who had coped with crises: from the worst – a murdered child; the police knocking on the door to say ‘I’m sorry to say we have found a body’ – to nowcommonplace events: financial distress; a son coming out as gay. They covered blows, setbacks, heartbreaks and fate striking out of a clear blue sky – things we hope will never happen to us, but are always ready to hear about from others. How boldly affecting that series seemed.
Jane Garvey’s new series, Life Changing, opened with a catastrophe so unimaginable that its image lodged in my head, joining that frightful cluster of guilts, anxieties and regrets that can jostle in one’s wakeful mind in the
small hours. I kept thinking of Grace, the shining young woman, a champion climber, a medic with all life before her, who was walking through the Westfield shopping centre when a man jumped down on her from three floors above, fracturing her spine, leaving her paralysed. The positivity of her demeanour – looking forward to being the doctor in the wheelchair, never for a moment hating the jumping man – was admirable, but also baffling.
The programme’s subjects divide into saints who after a life-changing experience devote their lives to altruism (sunny-natured Harriet, who saw her two sisters die in an air crash when she was eight and now travels the world’s trouble spots, dispensing human rights) and those who for whatever reason brought their misfortune upon themselves: the online gambling addict who stole £1.7m and lost wife, job and home; he now counsels other addicts.
Jane Garvey’s much-praised downhome warmth and empathy are fine vehicles for drawing out these narratives. But I ponder on our motives for listening: are we uplifted and inspired? Or made more anxious – more hedged about by doomy pessimism?
Now here was an online conversation worth recording for posterity: two uniquely distinctive voices, Glenda Jackson and Peter Brook. She is 84, and first auditioned for him in 1964. Brook spoke from Paris, his theatrical plans stalled by COVID. But, at 96, he is still directing – a word he hates; he prefers to be a guide, helping actors to avoid snakes in the terrain.
He also recoiled from Jackson’s telling him, ‘You are the greatest director in the world.’ It was like hearing her ‘throwing insults at my mother. Please, no praise.’ Jackson fielded the cantankerous responses with grace. A good mix: two unemotional, opinionated professionals, each of whose work will live on in memory.
Just one word to add about the Duke. After all the complaints about coverage, the best way to experience the funeral was via Radio 4, with occasional peeks at the TV screen. All the dignity came through words and sounds – hooves, trumpets, bagpipes, Nimrod, Ecclesiasticus and restrained commentators: Martha Kearney, Eleanor Oldroyd, Clare Balding and Allan Little.
A question: do Oldie readers listen to more podcasts than steam radio? I asked a wise friend of 82 whether she ever listened to podcasts, and she replied, ‘All the time.’ She sent me a list of 50 straight off, from Private Eye’s Page 94 to Paxo’s podcast: she was just off on a train to Bristol, taking the wonderful Marcovaldo on her phone. Have readers switched their habits, too?
Finally, welcome back to Alfie, our witty police sergeant friend from Humberside, and It’s a Fair Cop (Radio 4). First, we had to decide: dog theft has risen, but is a missing dog a police matter? The exciting denouement of the search for stolen Milly starred Alfie’s own retired police dog, Zeus.
‘We often call our dogs after Greek mythical heroes,’ he explained. ‘Which can sound a bit silly in training, when you shout “Achilles! Heel!” ’
TELEVISION
ROGER LEWIS
Often the only person watching telly in the entire country is me.
I’m referring to the ‘teleshopping’ channels, which take over in the small hours. Nattering like gypsies down the market, unseen presenters attempt to sell opal rings not made of opals, paint-rollers, foot cream, blackout curtains and feather pillows containing ‘breathable eco-cell foam’, guaranteed not to smother asthmatics. As I’m usually too drunk at 3am to read my credit-card numbers, none or anyway little of the junk turns up here, but it is like experiencing time being killed.
Yet evening telly can be equally enervating, as if the programme-makers don’t expect viewers to have their wits about them. Did you see Keeping Faith, for example, where Celia Imrie pulled a gun? The Carmarthenshire world depicted was nonsensical. A solicitor who’d been to prison for fraud and who couldn’t manage elementary conveyancing hadn’t been disbarred; everyone lived in castles and expensive barn conversions with subtropical gardens, even a jobbing builder; a boy who had terminal brain cancer, and a one-per-cent chance of recovery, recovered – there he was at a beach barbecue. In the entirety of west Wales, there was a single police officer, poor old Sergeant Williams, pottering about on her own in a copse in long shot, with no back-up or forensics.
Eve Myles, as Faith, shouted and stormed around, always boiling over – smashing her mobile phone, banging the steering wheel, thumping on windows and slamming doors, ripping up flowers. Only a Welsh woman could be this excitable and vehement, as I know for a fact, having grown up with lots of them – but the twist was that, as Celia’s daughter, Faith was a Londoner, on the run from her gangster past.
Everyone has been irritated by the jargon in Line of Duty – a ‘chis’ is a ‘covert human intelligence source’, as if there are animal or Martian variants – yet what bugged me is the way female detectives dress badly, in ill-fitting trousers and black jackets, like unkempt lesbians deliberately refusing to make anything of themselves.
But then Emily Watson also remained in full, drab misery-guts mode in Too Close, the three-parter about a ‘forensic psychiatrist’ interrogating a bruised and battered ‘little lost posh girl’, who’d driven her car, containing two children, into the drink. Was Denise Gough mad and murderous, her amnesia faked, or mad and worthy of sympathy?
The idea that keeping up appearances requires monumental effort – the façade of yoga class, pony clubs and extra Mandarin; that screaming toddlers push a person to the limit; that each of us risks fracture: all this was promising. Also, the way patient and therapist began mirroring each other’s emotions had potential. Yet soon enough, Denise was setting fire to her cell with a purloined lighter and she and Emily were in the grounds climbing a tree and singing a duet.
In the documentary Grace Kelly’s Missing Millions, Grace’s millions weren’t missing at all. She’d formed a charitable trust, or else had given everything away
to her children. The only real mystery wasn’t addressed: why such a Hollywood beauty ended up in exile with billionaire Rainier, who had the sex appeal of a Cesar Romero wax figurine, with his podginess and his dress uniform covered with bogus-looking Ruritanian medals.
Another daft one was Queen Elizabeth and the Spy in the Palace, about Soviet double agent Anthony Blunt, who, despite having what was called here ‘a mania for betrayal’, helpfully looted Hesse castles, concealing and removing evidence of the Royal Family’s Nazi sympathies.
‘Could these secrets hurt the Royal Family today?’ it was wondered. Was there collusion between MI5 and everyone else? I had not known Blunt was the Queen Mother’s third cousin, but otherwise the ground was thoroughly covered decades ago in Alan Bennett’s play A Question of Attribution.
When an elderly sailor died in Windsor in April, unleashing a bonanza fortnight for royal-correspondent bores, such was the crassness and mawkishness of the television coverage, the BBC received 110,994 complaints at the latest count. The public didn’t want wall-towall Prince Philip tributes; they wanted Gregg Wallace eulogising beetroot pickled in Japanese seaweed.
What kept me from wanting to shoot up a beech with Emily Watson was Country House Rescue, repeated on an obscure channel. A jolly Margaret Rutherford woman, Ruth Watson, visited Kentchurch Court, Herefordshire, a gloriously shabby Lucas-scudamore pile filled with dog-gnawed carpets and chipped Grinling Gibbons wainscots.
The châtelaine, cash poor despite owning thousands of adjacent acres, was very reluctant to allow ordinary people into the gardens – daylight being let in upon magic, so to speak. Lurking in a ruined orangery in this time warp were the son and daughter, as slender and vague as Waugh’s Flytes. The red-haired Lucas-scudamore daughter in particular might be compared to a summer’s day.