Raging Bull's Birthday
On November 13 (according to some sources - 14) 1980 the premiere of Martin Scorsese's biopic "Raging Bull" took place in New York. The film reproduces some pages from the life of the famous boxer Giacobbe (Jake) Lamotta, who from the early 40s to the mid 50s played with great success in the professional ring and in 1949 won the world middleweight title.
Let me remind you of the prehistory of the picture, which is known to many, but probably not to everyone. In 1974, while filming Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece "The Godfather. Part II", Robert De Niro met and befriended Jake Lamotta. Lamotta presented the actor with a copy of the book of his memoirs "Raging Bull: My Story" with the dedication "For the only actor in the world who could depict my crazy life." De Niro got the idea to reproduce on the screen the image of a boxer, famous not only and not so much for his sporting achievements, but for his uncontrollable behavior and cruel treatment of his loved ones. With this idea, De Niro began to turn to various producers, but everyone, knowing the repulsive side of Lamotta's character, refused. Only the producers of United Artists accepted De Niro's offer, but stipulated that Martin Scorsese should direct the film.
Then Robert De Niro turned to Martin Scorsese. But De Niro's proposal did not arouse enthusiasm at the director. Firstly, at that moment he was immersed in the work on the film "Alice Does Not Live Here Anymore". And secondly, Scorsese is absolutely not a sports person, and the topic of sports in general and boxing in particular was not at all close to him. In short, the conversation ended with Scorsese and De Niro making a movie soon, but it was "Taxi Driver".
After "Taxi Driver" Scorsese together with De Niro shot the musical "New York, New York", but their joint project actually ended in failure. A failure in many ways: no prestigious film awards, no financial success. The box office barely covered the film's production costs. Scorsese became depressed, and therefore he began to shoot only documentaries, avoiding offers of full-length feature films. De Niro, on the contrary, solidified his acting success in "Taxi Driver" with a role in Michael Cimino's great movie "The Deer Hunter".
Scorsese's depression almost ended in failure: he, carried away by drugs, almost died from an overdose. And then De Niro again invited him to make a film based on Lamotta's memoirs, promising to help, including financially, to get rid of drug addiction. This time, Scorsese let himself be persuaded, discovering many similarities between sports and filmmaking. He decided to make the film as an allegory for life in general. This decision, in particular, was reflected in the fact that in the film about a boxer, the scenes of boxing fights take a total of no more than 10 minutes. But on the other hand, they were filmed for 6 weeks, and with the involvement of choreography teachers.
Not being a boxing expert, Scorsese attended several boxing matches to gain the necessary experience, during which he was literally struck by drops of blood on the ropes enclosing the ring and blood-soaked sponges with which the coaches rubbed the bodies of athletes during the breaks between rounds. It was these impressions, not the most pleasant for a person who is not a fan of power martial arts and sports in general, that led the director to the idea to shoot a film in black and white. Another reason to shoot a black and white picture was the desire not to be like the films about Rocky, depicting the beating of one person by another in a radiantly optimistic style.
And Robert De Niro, once again confirming his professional approach to acting, underwent extensive physical training, and then took part in three real Brooklyn boxing matches and won two of them. Moreover, in preparation for the role, De Niro spent about a thousand rounds with the real Jake Lamotta, who, however, by that time was already under 60 years old. Lamotta praised De Niro's boxing conditions very highly, saying that he could well have successfully performed in the professional ring.
True, this boxing training also had negative consequences: during filming, being carried away, De Niro broke the rib of Joe Pesci ("Goodfellas", "Home Alone"), who was playing his brother and sparring partner. However, after the film, De Niro and Pesci became very close friends and subsequently starred in 6 more films together.
The shooting of the picture was carried out in two stages. At the first stage, from April 16, 1979 to mid-June 1979, scenes with the "young" Lamotta were filmed. Then there was a break for 4 months, during which Robert De Niro gained weight to visually match Lamotta's mature age. Eating pasta with a vanilla milkshake for the night, the actor gained 27 kilograms. Fearing for the health of the overweight actor, as it was very difficult to play, Scorsese tried to reduce the second stage to 2 months, and in mid-December the shooting was completed.
But then Scorsese spent almost a year on post-production, which caused serious displeasure among the producers of the United Artists film company. This sluggishness was due to the fact that Scorsese, after the failure of "New York, New York", was confident that "Raging Bull" would be his last film, and therefore wanted to perfect his alleged "swan song".
In early 1981, Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull" received 7 Golden Globe nominations. But it won only one of them - Best Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama (Robert De Niro). In the most important nominations - Best Motion Picture - Drama and Best Director - Motion Picture - "Raging Bull" and its director lost, respectively, to the film "Ordinary People" and its director Robert Redford.
A little later, in the same 1981, Martin Scorsese's film "Raging Bull" received 8 Oscar nominations. However, he received only two awards: again for Best Actor (Robert De Niro) and for Best Editing. Such a curious case is known. Martin Scorsese went to the toilet during the awards ceremony. There he was trapped in a corner by three FBI agents demanding to appear immediately for interrogation. The fact is that on the eve of the ceremony, a certain John Hinckley Jr. tried to shoot President Ronald Reagan. During interrogation, Hinckley said that he had watched Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" 15 times (because he was obsessed with the actress Jodie Foster). In this regard, the FBI had questions for Scorsese. The director asked to give him the opportunity to wait for the announcement of the results in the nominations for Best Film and Best Director. (Both involved "Raging Bull." But the agents said there was no need for that, as both nominations went to Robert Redford's "Ordinary People". This is about ensuring confidentiality in determining the Oscar winners.
In the same year, the Italian Film Academy nominated Martin Scorsese for its David di Donatello Prize for Best Foreign Director. But the victory in this nomination was awarded to Akira Kurosawa for his film "Kagemusha".
The vast majority of professional film critics have given "Raging Bull" accolades. For example, the guru of American film critic Roger Ebert, who never hid his admiration for the work of Martin Scorsese, devoted two reviews to the film. In both, he rated the film 4 stars out of 4 and included the film in his list of "Great Movies". The first review, dated December 1980, he began with the following paragraph: "Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull" is a movie about brute force, anger, and grief. It is also, like several of Scorsese's other movies, about a man's inability to understand a woman except in terms of the only two roles he knows how to assign her: virgin or whore. There is no room inside the mind of the prizefighter in this movie for the notion that a woman might be a friend, a lover, or a partner. She is only, to begin with, an inaccessible sexual fantasy. And then, after he has possessed her, she becomes tarnished by sex. Insecure in his own manhood, the man becomes obsessed by jealousy -- and releases his jealousy in violence."
And the second review, written already in May 1998, 18 years later, Ebert concluded with the words: "“Raging Bull” is the most painful and heartrending portrait of jealousy in the cinema--an “Othello” for our times. It's the best film I've seen about the low self-esteem, sexual inadequacy and fear that lead some men to abuse women."
It is interesting that the comparison of the film "Raging Bull" with the works of Shakespeare is made not only by Roger Ebert, but also by the Russian film critic Yevgeny Nefyodov: ""We can safely talk about Shakespeare's depth and scale of characters tempered in emotional storms, although Scorsese removed (or rather, replaced, on the advice of another cinematographer, Michael Powell, on reminiscences from the drama "On the Waterfront" /1954/ ) clear allusions to "Richard III"".
Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull" was a moderate success at the box office. In the first year of its screening in the United States, it was watched by 8.7 million moviegoers, or about 4% of the population. Much of this moderate success is due to the film's severe rental limitations. Accordingly, the box office in the United States exceeded, but not by much, $ 23 million. However, these fees allowed to cover the film's budget of $ 18 million.
The following figures indicate the success of Martin Scorsese's film "Raging Bull" among modern moviegoers: 72% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave this film ratings from 8 to 10. Taking this into account and the above, the rating of Martin Scorsese's film "Raging Bull" according to FilmGourmand 'a was 8.139, which provided it 537th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
In addition to all of the above achievements, as the merit of the "Raging Bull" film's should be attributed the fact that it actually returned to the cinema the great master - Martin Scorsese, as well as the wonderful actor Joe Pesci, who, having played his first role in the unsuccessful film "The Death Collector" ( 1976), became disillusioned with cinema and took up the restaurant business.
