On Screen

...Snapping his fingers, chewing gum, twitching his eyebrows, or compulsively shooting off his mouth, he's always keeping time to music he alone can hear—until he succeeds, Svengali-like, in molding his proteges to do the crooning he thinks he can't do...

...it is a totally arbitrary moment of intense pathos...

...Jealousy has probably never been so furious on screen as in the scenes where he seizes on his wife's insignificant remarks and escalates them into major marital crises...

...There is a quick cut to the corner, where the fighter and his handlers talk for what seems like an eternity, undisturbed by the buzz of the crowd...

...His brief appearance as one of the psychotic thugs in Who 'II Stop the Rain only whetted my appetite for seeing him in more and meatier roles...

...On the other hand, although the director doesn't have to account for why La Motta subjects himself and his loved ones to such pain, I think he does have to let us know why he is putting us through it...

...There are Jeff Barry's songs, at once sappier than Fabian's offerings and anachronistic, sounding more like disco tunes than rock-and-roll...

...T <Jk he same is true of Ray Sharkey in The Idolmaker...

...Nevertheless, Robert De Niro is riveting as he utterly refuses to compromise Scorsese's brutal conception of the protagonist...

...Near the end of the movie, when La Motta is jailed for pimping for a female minor, the screenplay allows the character a brief cry of humanity: "I'm not an animal," he wails in anguish, caged in a dark underground cell...

...Still, he brings an impressive intelligence and an exhilarating energy to the screen...

...There is a contrived romance between Vincent and a fan-magazine editor (Tovah Feldshuh, of all people) who is as eager to exploit their relationship for business reasons as he is...

...The lack of contrast and shading reduces Raging Bull to less than the sum of its parts...

...At the end of Raging Bull De Niro manages this task with aplomb...

...We hear only the slap of leather, the crunch of bone, the grunts and wheezing of punished bodies...

...Though shot mostly in black and white, it is garish, particularly in its expres-sionistic photography of the boxing sequences...

...It merely strings together one climax after another, with little modulation in either emotion or action...

...Ihope both will be better served by directors and screenwriters in the future...

...Yet these are merely gimmicks compared to his immersion in the character...

...The Idolmaker is Sharkey's second starring role of the year, but neither it nor his first—in Paul Mazursky's unfortunate Willieand Phil—is worthy of him...

...Camera shutters whir and circles of light burst like fireworks from flashbulbs accompanied by ever louder pops as the bulbs explode...

...It is often said that the toughest piece of acting is to play a bad actor...

...The problem is that as these brutal ballets recur time and again, as La Motta destroys one opponent after another, the director's estheti-cism is battling with the fighter's gritty life story...

...Just as its title character, the boxer Jake La Motta, led with his skull in reckless disregard of damage to his brain, the film hurls itself at you headfirst...

...Robert DeNiro's energetic performance in the lead and Scorsese's equally forceful, at times daring direction score heavily in the vicinity of the viewer's viscera...

...Sitting in front of a mirror in a dressing room more than a dozen years after losing his crown, he is rehearsing for "An Evening with Jake La Motta," a hotel lounge act in which he recites lines from Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling and William Shakespeare...

...The crowd noise gradually builds up into a feral roar as the fighters step toward each other and the maelstrom begins anew...

...Consider the following: A black screen is suddenly bisected by a microphone descending in closeup from an invisible ceiling...

...Early in the film there is an effectively comic scene of Vincent watching offstage while his first "discovery," Tommy Dee (Paul Land), wows pimply adolescents at a sock hop...

...I've been a fan of Sharkey's brand of urban punk savvy since I first saw him Martin Brest's Hot Tomorrows in 1977...

...Playing Vincent Vaccari, a composite of the promoters who made stars out of such unpromising material as Frankie Avalon and Fabian in the early '60s, Sharkey moves as if he were afflicted with St...

...Scorsese punctuates the movie with these highly stylized ring sequences almost like a boxer punching and coun-terpunching...

...directed at his wife—or with an evil look accompanying a pointed, smoldering silence...

...We find ourselves dazed during two hours of pummeling by a work that treads the fine line separating bravura from hysteria—and often topples over...

...Much has been made of the physical aspects of De Niro's training under La Motta to harden his physique and learn the boxer's ring style, then his gaining 50 pounds to match the appearance of the bloated ex-champion on the skids...

...De Niro's power to mete out punishment like a real contender is not nearly so impressive as his depicting an abusive self-destructive monster...

...And De Niro makes vivid La Motta's misogyny in quieter moments with his tone of voice—a callous "Who asked you...

...Indeed, the movie is so full of energy that it whirls furiously in circles, seemingly at war with itself as it pits eye against mind, heart against gut...

...A sweaty face fills the screen, and long moments later a glove smashes into the left cheek, causing the nose to spew a stream of blood across the right cheek...

...The director and his screenwriters, Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader, shun any easy moralizing about the horrors of boxing, and they spare us the tedious details of the fighter's environment that would "explain" the wrath driving him inside and outside the arena...

...Unlike such classics as The Setup, The Harder They Fall or Body and Soul, however, Raging Bull, for all its combat both in and out of the ring, lacks shape...

...Throughout the nonsense Sharkey struts like a bantam rooster on parade...

...Against a hazy background of smoke swirling up from ringside, the boxers square off and begin a violent slow-motion pas de deux...

...His wife-beating, his deal with the mob to throw a fight (resulting in his temporary suspension and nearly costing him a title shot), his brief hold on the crown and subsequent rapid decline after a short interlude as a nightclub owner, his imprisonment on a morals charge and pathetic career as a comedian introducing strippers in one sleazy joint after another—all of these could have been the elements of a strong screenplay about the cruel toll of boxing that bared the dark and explosive side of human nature...

...But nothing we have seen during the preceding hour and 45 minutes would cause us to agree...

...Any competent actor can evoke rage for dramatic effect, but only a performer as gifted as De Niro can make the affectlessness of a brute so poignant...

...The gentle murmur of the crowd grows louder as the timer's bell clangs and the master of ceremonies introduces the fighters...

...But we are not too stunned to wonder why we are sitting there and watching such a brutal and unrepentantly repellent character...

...By lunging for a knockout in every scene, Scorsese fractures the film's dramatic logic...

...The bell rings once more...

...Suddenly, the round ends...

...La Motta starts out as a nasty pug from the Bronx and ends up no better...

...On the one hand, I think it was wise and brave of Scorsese to portray La Motta's savagery without making or inviting judgments...

...When he finally makes it, the top differs little from the bottom—a nice house on Pel-ham Parkway, a Cadillac, a new wardrobe for his wife, to be sure, but his rage against the world and himself are stronger than before, and his paranoiac jealousy of his wife is more consuming...

...The story of La Motta's rise to and fall from the middleweight championship during the '40s and '50s, based on his autobiography of the same name, does have a certain ugly fascination...

...Even sitting down he can't stay still...

...Finally, there is Taylor Hackford's engineering of the big stage numbers (including light shows), which bring to mind the fantasies of Allan Carr rather than anything Alan Freed ever produced...

...Unfortunately, this sentimental conclusion to Edward Di Lorenzo's hackneyed script is not the worst feature of the film...

...When he comes to the line "I coulda been a contender—I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am," his phrasing is awkward, his intonation flat...

...He is not quite in De Niro's league...

...His quick descent takes him back to the jungle that seemed like his natural habitat from the beginning...

...Vitus' Dance...

...As Tommy goes through the hilariously authentic song-and-shimmy typical of the era, his manager simultaneously mouths the songs and performs each hand gesture, each twitch of the pelvis much better than his star...

...This is hardly surprising, since Vincent dreamed up and choreographed the whole act...

...The effect is chilling: There is not a spark of self-consciousness in his eyes, no glimmer of recognition that those words could mean any more to him than the canned jokes he once used to warm up an audience for a stripper...

...No teen idol can be scrawny and balding...

...His pre-title fights seem fueled less by a contender's ambition than by a sociopath's anger...

...Of course it works out in the end, when the Idol-maker "discovers" himself and comes to grips with his own frustrated ambitions...

...Too bad his gifts are in the service of an ultimately unsatisfying enterprise...

...Staring at his reflection —his face puffy, almost beyond recognition, his neck spilling out over his collar—he mumbles the famous Marlon Brando monologue from On the Waterfront...

...As we are reeling from the visceral impact of those ring sequences— or from the no less violent scenes of La Motta's domestic life—we are struck almost as forcibly by the film's dramatic and moral emptiness, by its point-lessness...

...The only thing stopping him from becoming a star, he tells himself, is his looks...

...A quick pat of the hand to make sure his carefully combed hair is in place, a minute adjustment of the precisely turned-up collar of his leather jacket and he's off, eyes darting around to soak up the scene as his mouth moves nonstop in the insinuating patter of the born hustler...

...As in Taxi Driver—also directed by Scorsese from a script by Schrader—the actor is better than his material...