Let's talk Jake Lamotta

[TheGreatA]

If it's LaMotta the person you want to talk about, he was clearly a terrible human being who needed very little provocation to set him off. He was also an entertaining showman with an endless supply of one-liners.

In the ring he was one of his era's best and most exciting fighters. A lot of boxers with his aggressive style could learn from him. His objective was to make the contest as uncomfortable as possible for the opponent.





Some footage of LaMotta in his prime:

[mkennedy25]

Lamotta was an ATG at MW for sure. It's a shame whenever bringing him up the conversations usually revert back to his movie and book and not his boxing skills.

I thought is was interesting though how the book was a lot more intense and showed the darkness of Lamotta more than the movie. Usually movies tend to exagerate. Not that I liked this movie at all but I was appalled at how Cinderella man painted Max baer as such remoresless person about the one of his opponents dying in the ring and the other being severley traumatized as well. From what I understand Max was devasted by the death.

[Forza]

Good stuff A.

It's disappointing to learn about how some of the greats were wretched human beings outside the ring. I've read some terrible things about ray robinson.

[Thread Stealer]

Besides his inhuman chin, you know what else I was impressed about with LaMotta while watching the 6th Robinson fight? His double jab.






Watching Raging Bull, or looking at selected highlights, you would think Jake was crude. But he had a tricky defense, using his upper body to avoid blows. He wasn't the biggest puncher but wasn't feather-fisted, and was physically strong.

You don't reach the level he did and perform so well without skills.

[joseph5620]

Besides his inhuman chin, you know what else I was impressed about with LaMotta while watching the 6th Robinson fight? His double jab.





Watching Raging Bull, or looking at selected highlights, you would think Jake was crude. But he had a tricky defense, using his upper body to avoid blows. He wasn't the biggest puncher but wasn't feather-fisted, and was physically strong.

You don't reach the level he did and perform so well without skills.

Both Lamotta and Robinson talked about that jab during this interview.
I thought hearing their views on it was pretty cool.

[Forza]

If you can slip that many prime SRR punches you are for sure not a brawler

[King Kong]

I don't care about the accuracy to real life of Raging Bull, Hollywood is always inaccurate. It's a great, great movie because it tells a damn good story in a very good way, and everyone involved does a tremendous job in their roles. You're just not topping DeNiro in that role.

I'm not so concerned with "realism" as I am with Scorsese tastelessly imposing his baggage upon LaMotta.

The more you look into how the movie came to be, the more apparent Marty's lack of sympathy/empathy with his subject becomes. And it shows up in the finished piece.

DeNiro does his thing, nails surface details, mannerisms, and lots of people (including Jake) like to see him do that, I understand. He gets too much credit, though - Cathy Moriarty's Vickie is by far the best performance in the movie, uncovering depths that only highlight the deficiency in DeNiro's portrayal of her husband.

LaMotta had a soul which just isn't captured by the film (which is visually stunning, its saving grace).

The director and his star produced the biggest misfire of their working relationship here.

[SCtrojansbaby]

Raging Bull is a great movie and easily one of DeNiro's top 3 all time

[TheGreatA]

I'm not so concerned with "realism" as I am with Scorsese tastelessly imposing his baggage upon LaMotta.

The more you look into how the movie came to be, the more apparent Marty's lack of sympathy/empathy with his subject becomes. And it shows up in the finished piece.

DeNiro does his thing, nails surface details, mannerisms, and lots of people (including Jake) like to see him do that, I understand. He gets too much credit, though - Cathy Moriarty's Vickie is by far the best performance in the movie, uncovering depths that only highlight the deficiency in DeNiro's portrayal of her husband.

LaMotta had a soul which just isn't captured by the film (which is visually stunning, its saving grace).

The director and his star produced the biggest misfire of their working relationship here.

I thought they actually left out the worst parts in LaMotta's life, probably because it would've been too difficult to sympathise with LaMotta at all.

[King Kong]

I thought they actually left out the worst parts in LaMotta's life, probably because it would've been too difficult to sympathise with LaMotta at all.

"No...you were worse!"

It was De Niro's interest in Jake that eventually persuaded -- and it did require some persuading -- a nonplussed Scorsese to make the film. With the film (against his own expectations) becoming a subject of such accumulative critical celebration and thus a landmark in his career, naturally, Scorsese has warmed to his theme over time and come to be somewhat loquacious on the character of Jake. But he found LaMotta completely impenetrable when making the movie, having been unable to make any sense of his book, relying on De Niro's enthusiasm for the role as his guide to what Jake should be - that he found it difficult even to look past his typical disdain for "sports" (guys who box must be unintelligent, insensitive morons with shallow characters, right?) is telling of the kind of elementary issues he had 'relating' to LaMotta.

De Niro, on the other hand, was only too infatuated with certain elements of Jake's character and creates a romanticized tough-guy charicature out of them, an image that I guess was appealing to him - yes, De Niro's LaMotta is still a brute, but in a way that is nuanced and appealing to a certain perception of alpha manhood, small matters like **** being unpalatable inconveniences. De Niro even makes Jake a ladykiller (LaMotta's awkwardness with women is utterly absent in his slaying of Vickie in their first meetings).
His influence on the version of LaMotta we're given in the movie, including what got left out and what didn't, shouldn't be underestimated.

When I say sympathy/empathy, I'm referring more to Scorsese's relationship to his subject (although that, to some degree, informs audience reaction), the necessary ability of a director to think in more than one mind, which seems to have been impaired here.
Reading the book, even with the **** account, the image you're left with of LaMotta isn't a soulless one. While it might seem paradoxical, I think leaving some of those really ugly things in would (depending on the treatment) have given the film some of the kind of viscerality and catharsis that produces real audience empathy (the film picks up at a point years after the near-murder of Harry Gordon, so obviously not every event in the book could've been included without making a very long movie covering almost 50 years).

All you see of LaMotta for most of the movie is just a charicature, albeit replete with plausible aggression and violence, but with little insight into the man. De Niro's dedication to method in the second part of the movie and the facility with which he assimilates the surface mannerisms and affectations of broke-down "showman" period Jake are superficially impressive. In this contrast from the first part, we finally get some nuance, some glimpse into Jake, but too little and too late. The stunted portrayal of younger Jake means there's nothing, no emotional investment, to be parlayed into something greatly affecting by the second part, anyway.


That's a small expansion on my complaints about the film, anyway.


For De Niro, I'll take his John Civello, Rupert Pupkin, Travis Bickle, Jimmy Doyle, Sam Rothstein and Max Cady over his LaMotta all day. And that's not even mentioning his roles outside the relationship with Scorsese (Michael Vronsky etc.).


Sorry to take it into a discussion more about movies than boxing, but this one's a bugbear of mine, so the thread is an opportunity to vent.