Besides De Niro's dominating performance, there are also very good contributions from Cathy Moriarty as Vicki and from Joe Pesci as La Motta's loyal brother Joey, another frequent target of abuse despite his loyalty. He treats his beautiful wife Vicki particularly badly, frequently (and irrationally) suspecting her of infidelity and subjecting her to both verbal and physical abuse.
His aggression is not something confined to the ring, but rather an inherent part of his personality, and comes out in his dealings with others. Unlike his great rival Sugar Ray Robinson, an elegant practitioner of the art of boxing, La Motta tries to overpower his rivals with brute force rather than relying on skill. De Niro portrays him as a man with a very short fuse, seething with anger and violence. La Motta, as portrayed in this film, did not fall into this category. Some boxers- Henry Cooper comes to mind- are hard-hitting inside the ring but gentlemanly and restrained outside. De Niro actually learned to box for the film, and did all the boxing scenes himself without using a stunt double, but his portrayal of La Motta's private life is equally effective. The other remarkable thing about the film is the performance of Robert de Niro, for which he won a well-deserved Best Actor Academy Award.
This is remarkably effective for the boxing scenes, which have a raw, brutal power and graphically depict the aggressive nature of the sport. Scorsese has tried to capture the look of both the films and the newsreels of that period. The use of black-and-white seems to have been inspired by the fact that the film depicts real-life events that occurred in the forties and fifties. `Raging Bull'- a biography of the boxer Jake La Motta who for a time held the world middleweight championship- is one of the few exceptions. Since then black-and-white has been used very sparingly even Polanski's `Chinatown', obviously conceived as homage to the films noirs of the 1940s and 1950s, was shot in colour.
The routine use of black-and-white film to make movies seems to have ended in the mid-sixties, probably killed off by the advent of colour television.
0 kommentar(er)
