Raging Bull

Dir. Martin Scorcese Embassy

This has got to have been the shortest retirement in history. There I was, calmly minding my own business at the sanitorium, when in walks HM, twists my arm up behind my back, says 'you don't escape that easily', and buzzes me off to see Raging Bull. Within a moment of entering the theatre, I could tell that nothing had changed during my brief absence: 'Twenty of Today's Great Country Hits Played on Electric Guitar', echoing down, large as life, ugly as sin, from the PA system. I don't know if you've noticed, but they have a slide they show at intermission saying that the recordings played in the theatre come from Chelsea Records. I forthwith announce that I am withdrawing my custom from Chelsea records, and ask anyone who reads this column (Mum?) to do likewise. (I am going to keep on saying this until something is done by the theatres. Managers, you have been warned.)

To the theatre's credit, the featurette is excellent, an interesting and gripping dramatised documentary about bushfires in NSW. It's rather powerful, and I couldn't help wondering if it wouldn't overpower the main feature if this was a little insipid, as these feted Hollywood movies so often are.

I needn't have worried. Raging Bull is pretty damned powerful. It is not as brilliant, or inspired, or sensational as the hype would have you believe; but on the other hand it is not as banal, or boring, or glib as the hype would lead you to expect. It is a satisfying movie, and in five year's time when all the hoo-ha has cooled off, it will still be worth seeing. Raging Bull is satisfying partly because of its plot. This is based on fact, on the autobiography of the real 'Raging Bull', the boxer Jake La Motta. Perhaps' for this reason, it is an off-beat sort of a story, about a boxer who wins a title, loses it, his family, and his wife, and then becomes a successful nightclub comedian. It is not simplistic; the ending is not pattly fictional, but ambiguously realistic, being both sad (La Motta has lost so much on the way to where he is) and happy (he has become a success, a 'contender', in a field where he is no longer forced to worry about his weight or about some green kid knocking him out of the ring.)

De Niro $pectacular

Covering twenty years, the part of La Motta is a plumb one, and who else but Robert De Niro could play it? If nothing else, what other actor, apart from Elizabeth Taylor, could put on and take off about twenty kilos during the production of one film? De Niro is renowned for his 'method' acting, and is perhaps the only actor around at the moment whose total involvement in the parts he plays is comparable to that of the young Brando. His performance in Raging Bull is spectacular and energetic, and obviously very strenuous -someone should tell Mr De Niro that there are easier ways to get an Oscar than by having his face punched in!

Another reason why this film is so satisfactory is the general high quality of the production. Martin Scorcese has directed De Niro in a similar sort of role set in the same period before (New York, New York), and now seems thoroughly adept at dealing with the two decades 1940 to 60. In particular, the idea of shooting in black and white gives the film a genuine, documentary feeling, perhaps because most of us derive our impressions of the forties and fifties from monochrome photographs and newsreels.

The standard of the photography is excellent, crisp and luminous, and generally makes you wish they'd get rid of gooey technicolor once and for all. The camera work and editing of the brief boxing sequences which seem to fill so much of the film, yet in fact only make up a few minutes of the total, are particularly good. The camera swoops and soars, around and above, between the ropes, down from the ceiling with the judge's microphone, and finally down onto the canvas with a KO'd loser. The camera even becomes subjective at times, giving a 'La Motta's-eye-view' of the action in slow motion. This can be a little obtrusive, or even slightly heavy-handed, but it fits in well with the form of the movie as a reminiscence by La Motta over his career. Even the brief sequence of coloured 'home movies' right in the middle of the movie works rather like the photographs you find printed in the centre of a written autobiography.

Perhaps some groups could take exception to some of the content of this film; some will be turned off by the violence of some of the boxing sequences and by the very nature of the La Motta character, some by the language. (I wish I owned the copyright and got five cents every time they said "fuck" in this movie!) But it's a film for which it's well worth putting aside these prejudices, a film that may well last longer than many of its brasher contemporaries, and one of the best three dollars worths going in town at the moment.

S.D.