Martial Arts
Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull won an Oscar for Robert De Niro, with his portrayal of boxer Jake LaMotta’s misogyny, depravity and violence in and outside the ring. By Martin McKenzie-Murray.
Raging Bull and the real-life cruelty of Jake LaMotta
In his own words, Jake LaMotta was a “no-good bastard”, which I feel obliged to briefly detail: a confessed rapist, wife-beater and sex trafficker of kids, LaMotta was also the middleweight champion of the world in 1949. It was his ghostwritten memoir of 1970 – the one that confesses to squalor with such disturbing casualness – that Martin Scorsese took as the basis for his classic 1980 film Raging Bull.
LaMotta’s book opens with him describing how he once bashed a man to death with a lead pipe. His victim was a bookie, who’d left work with his day’s takings and who LaMotta stalked then bashed for his wallet.
The bookie’s name was Harry Gordon, and he didn’t die. LaMotta had only assumed as much. So severe were Gordon’s injuries and because LaMotta was never apprehended for the assault, he didn’t learn of the man’s survival until decades later. In all that time, LaMotta had thought of himself as a killer.
This isn’t included in the film, nor the rape that he casually admits to in the same book – though his capacity for sexual violence runs through the whole film.
Born in 1922, Jake LaMotta’s childhood was not dissimilar to Mike Tyson’s four decades later: with an abusive father, violence was absorbed young, then projected and refined on the streets of New York City. LaMotta said his father encouraged him to fight for money even as a child.
He lived his life through his body. His money, fame and self-worth all manifested in his capacity to inflict and absorb great harm. In Raging Bull, Robert De Niro captures the physicality of this: the musculature, sure, but also the forbidding swagger.
LaMotta’s childhood is not reflected in Scorsese’s film. There’s no psychologising, no foreshadowing, no implied chain of causality. We have only an explosive force of nature.
LaMotta is brutal, in the ring and outside it, and Scorsese is patient in showing us how much brutality measures the fighter’s life. It’s not only how he makes his living – it is what he applies to perceived injustices and what he’ll receive to punish his own sense of guilt. Violence is an ethic, a skill, a moral atmosphere. It’s everything, and LaMotta pegs his pride to how much he can endure and inflict.
He’s a monster and in his inarticulacy, he assumes the universality of violence as his only moral currency. He can’t see how his own absorption of punishment in the ring might not cleanse the history of his cruelty, and that his behaviour has left damage his professional success can’t heal.
You can’t like Jake, and Scorsese doesn’t want us to. In Raging Bull, he is purely elemental. A man made of little more than rage, lust and complicated pride. His sporting gifts are reckless ferocity and an extraordinary capacity to absorb punches. In 106 fights, LaMotta was knocked down only once – and that came very late in his career, when his severest opponent was booze and indifference.
If Muhammad Ali boasted about his prettiness and silky evasiveness, LaMotta boasted about the opposite: his face was blighted because he sought and withstood all punishment. His skills weren’t complicated. “I’d charge out of the corner, punch, punch, punch, never give up, take all the punishment the other guy could hand out but stay in there, slug and slug and slug,” he wrote in his memoir.
Scorsese pays almost sensual attention to this life: of sex and fights and the humidity of Bronx summers. There’s a lushness of specificity – from the sweat-streaked hair of Jake’s chest and the casually exposed legs of Vicki to the noisy carnival of the public pool and the clamour of a crowded nightclub.
The streets are alive and the insults wincingly vulgar. Here is life in all its noisy bonhomie and sweaty competition – and Scorsese captures its details carefully, without prurience or puritanism.
Much of the film is given to sweat and blood – so much so that their release comes to seem sacramental. Before their marriage dissolves, we watch Jake’s wife sanctify the cuts upon his face with kisses. Vicki’s a victim of her husband, but in this moment she’s both witness to and angelic healer of his injuries.
Such tenderness can’t go unpunished, though. Jake is deformed by sexual jealousy and mentally and physically abuses his wife for it. He finds cause for suspicion in the most idle remarks, and more than once his brother Joey will tell him he’s cracking up. There’s a sense that Jake wants to find confirmation of betrayal because it would finally liberate him from the torment of ambiguity – from questioning his own sanity.
When his exhausted wife mockingly confesses to having slept with his brother, Jake immediately accepts this as genuine – and bashes them both.
Like many other Scorsese antiheroes, Jake is so flagrant in his misogyny and infidelity that you wonder why he married in the first place. I can only answer: for the conventional social status and the possession of sexual chattel.
For a film often cited as one of the greatest ever made about sport, Raging Bull contains relatively little of it. But the fight scenes are intimate – their violence emphasised by slow-motion, high-contrast and heavy sound effects. There is also unflinching attention to the geysers of blood that erupt from swollen faces. These scenes comprise a primal pageantry; its director is more interested in punishment and its moral implications than he is with the sport’s athleticism or tactics.
Raging Bull is not a classic rise and fall story, even if its subject saw his life that way. The film is the story of a man born into violence, who then practises sanctioned and unsanctioned forms of it and is variously valorised and reviled. Jake LaMotta was born fallen.
After his retirement, LaMotta buys a nightclub and serves as its resident MC and comic. Raging Bull captures the grotesque monologues, rambling and bawdy, the crowd alternately appalled and entertained by the lurid spectacle. It captures too his physical transformation: his body is no longer an instrument, and it’s expanded now with endless drink and hotdogs.
It’s testament to the squalor of LaMotta’s life that a 129-minute film about it omits so much. There’s bankruptcy and jail; rape and attempted murder. But the tone of LaMotta’s book is that of a street-smart, wise-cracking Ring Lardner character – women are “broads” and men “guys”, and both are just looking for a good time in this crazy world. The book is written in the same style in which LaMotta fronted his Miami club – edgy tales from a larrikin raconteur – and it’s remarkable that Scorsese and his writers transformed this material into something resembling a biblical lament.
The nightclub is sold, however, and LaMotta is jailed in 1958 for encouraging a 14-year-old into sex work. His book ends curiously, with a reflection upon his time in prison, and it’s curious for the casual self-absorption – for the isolation of public adulation as the thing he most wants to regain. “When I was in the hole in that Florida prison, pounding the walls and screaming at God and finally feeling all the fear that had built up in a lifetime drain out of me,” he wrote. “I remembered being in a ring, the lights bright and the ref holding up my bruised and aching fist and saying I was the middleweight champion of the world and how everyone was screaming and cheering, and afterward how all the radios and newspapers in the world had stories about me, the slum kid from the Bronx … Here I was, in a hole as close to hell as I’ll ever want to get again, but I knew that I was going to get out of there … And maybe, if I fought hard enough and long enough, I would get people to cheer again. Who knows, maybe I will.”
A decade later, Scorsese’s Raging Bull lifted LaMotta from obscurity and increased demand for him on the club circuit. But the crowds weren’t cheering.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 11, 2025 as "The gilded rage".
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