Musclemen

...Altman's achievement in Popeye, it seems to me, is a cinematic tour de force—the successful realization of a live-action cartoon...

...This gives it a look distinctive among other contemporary films, yet reminiscent of the period with which Scorsese is dealing...

...And production designer Wolf Kroeger has contributed a wonderfully nutty, ramshackle set representing the entire town of Sweet-haven (as erected in a rocky cove on the island of Malta...

...The Jake La Motta whom Robert De Niro so palpably brings to life is an unattractive, unthinking, inarticulate brute...

...These varied aide-memoires serve to evoke what I take to be the film's thematic sub-text: the mysterious dynamics of memory and regret...

...But the film works, for me at least, primarily because of Altman's imaginative evocation of the world of cartoons...

...Apparently, the humiliation of this experience had a profound effect on him: By 1964, La Motta had returned to New York, performing in a night club act...

...The film's casting is uncanny, and the acting is both wacky and delightful...

...Most significantly, Scorsese maintains a neutral attitude toward the violence unleashed in the ring, and does not use these scenes for emotional arousal...

...The title refers to the 1970 autobiography of Jake (the Bronx Bull) La Motta, one-time middleweight boxing champion...

...This blow was followed by arrest on a morals charge—allowing a fourteen-year-old girl to operate as a prostitute out of his bar—for which La Motta was sentenced to six months in the Dade County stockade...

...The film, however, is less an adaptation of La Motta's book (written with Joseph Carter and Peter Savage) than a representation of Scorsese's and star Robert De Niro's view of him...

...Vicki took the kids and left him, however, after he opened a sleazy bar in Miami Beach and began indulging in heavy drinking and extramarital affairs...

...Robin Williams is an eminently suitable, raspy-voiced Popeye, who enlivens his performance with a con-starit stream of apparently improvised asides and fractured oaths...

...After the Robinson fight La Motta's Michael H. Seitz teaches film at Rutgers University and reviews films regularly for The Progressive...

...Robert Altman's Popeye has met with general critical disappointment, although I do not understand at all why...

...All these directorial touches combine to create a context in which the real can plausibly be transformed into the stuff of pure imagination...

...I'm not sure I like it, nor am I entirely convinced that Scorsese and De Niro have invested their efforts in a worthy or fruitful subject...

...He abandoned training, put on weight, and in 1954 had to retire from boxing altogether...

...Yet he is also a human being, made of all too mortal flesh— something La Motta himself doesn't seem to realize until the time of his wretched incarceration...

...Why...

...As a child I never cared much for Popeye, either in the form of E.C...

...The film, much of which was made on New York locations, has been shot in wonderfully gritty black and white...

...Raging Bull is thus essentially a film biography, but it differs from most works in the genre by its refusal to glorify the life it portrays...

...He breakfasts off images," director Michael Powell has observed, "and eats tapes for lunch...

...La Motta grew up as a poor Italian boy in the Bronx, landed in reform school, and began a professional boxing career in the early 1940s...

...Only about fifteen minutes of the film's two-hour running time depict action in the ring...

...The principal emphasis of the film is on the fighter's life outside the ring, especially as seen in his relationships with Vicki (Cathy Moriarty) and his brother Joey (Joe Pesci), who worked in Jake's corner and acted as his adviser...

...If this view of La Motta reflects Scorsese the one-time seminarian and would-be priest, still haunted by a Catholic notion of sin and redemption, Raging Bull's cinematic realization also reflects the artistic sensibility of Scorsese the obsessed film and image junkie...

...What prizefighting we do see comes as stylized renderings of pugilistic violence, enhanced by selective use of the camera and electronic manipulation of sound...

...life both in and out of the ring went into a swift decline...

...Segar's comic strips (upon which the movie is based), or of the Fleischer brothers' animated cartoons, so I approached the film with no sentimental attachment—and found it to be quite charming...

...Scorsese has found in La Motta's life an example of the possibility of redemption, even in the most unlikely cases...

...Cartoonist-writer Jules Feiffer has provided much wittier dialogue— loaded with hilarious malapropisms and other verbal bombs—than I ever recall finding in Segar's strip...

...He was a rough, brawling, and not especially artistic fighter, who both took and gave a great deal of punishment in the ring...

...And as he repeatedly pounds his head and fists against the wall, he cries out in agony, "I'm not an animal...

...Not a bad trick...

...Almost-every frame is packed with bits of comic business (Altman often seems quite as interested in peripheral or background action as in what is happening in the foreground), and the sound track is filled with crisscrossing and overlapping dialogue (another Alt-man trademark...

...he wails, alone in his cell—and by the very act of posing this question manifests, however minimally, his tortured humanity...

...The viewer is not encouraged to feel either revulsion or excitement over the ring's bloody spectacle, but is merely asked to accept it as a representation of the brutal, animalistic world in which La Motta lives...

...The movie shows almost nothing of the rigors of training, and does not represent enough of any single fight for the viewer to get a sense of it as a strategic or dramatic contest...

...The film, he has said, is a tale "of a guy attaining something, and losing everything, and then redeeming himself...

...In 1947, according to La Motta's own admission, he threw a fight to Billy Fox (for which he was briefly suspended by the Boxing Commission...

...Yet despite a few historical inaccuracies and transpositions, it does follow the major lines of the boxer's career...

...and not...

...I think, a bad movie...

...This he won in 1949, then lost in 1951 to the great Sugar Ray Robinson...

...The black-and-white narrative is intercut with several other sorts of images, equally associated with the process of recollection: clips from Jake's and Vicki's eight-millimeter color home movies, photographic fight stills, fight images on a television monitor...

...But I do feel that Raging Ball is one of few American films released in 1980 which merit serious critical discussion...

...But this dive, ordered by the Mob, earned La Motta a shot at the middleweight title...

...Our memories of the 1940s and early 1950s, after all, are inextricably fused with those of black-and-white movies and early television...

...Raging Bull is both compelling and disturbing...

...In the meantime he had managed to alienate just about everyone around him, and had moved to Florida with his children and second wife, Vicki (a cool blonde sex-pot, whom he married when she was only fifteen...

...Although Raging Bull traces the major events of La Motta's career, it is not really a fight movie...

...Harry Nilsson has given the film a number of genial, informally realized songs (including Popeye's catchy theme, "I Yam What I Yam...

...Shelley Duvall is the perfect embodiment of the kooky, muddle-headed Olive Oyl, and she provides some moments of pure comic magic with her show-stopping solo song-and-dance number, "He Needs Me...

...It is a work of great intensity, boasting superlative acting in the major roles, a number of memorable and finely staged scenes, rare (if misplaced) artistic conviction—and it continues to haunt me some weeks after my first viewing...

...Nor does the film seek to explain La Motta's dark and often self-destructive urges through facile psychobabble...

...Special effects are employed not just for spectacle, but to render the unlimited freedom of movement of a cartoon (Popeye, for example, slugs a bearded baddie, and the latter spectacularly spins down through the floor like a corkscrew...