(22 kg) in two months to play the aging Jake. He trained as a boxer for months until LaMotta, who coached him, believed the actor could be a contender he gained 50 lb. But in or out of the ring, De Niro is monstrously convincing. We’d say they are brutal but repetitious, without the build and threat of the fight sequences. Jake also fights with his brother Joey (Joe Pesci) and his blond, teen-goddess wife Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) anyone who thinks these Othello-Iago-Desdemona conflicts are the heart of the movie is welcome to fill out this paragraph. It is where Jake’s life finally achieves meaning when he wins the title and where, in his 1951 match with the stylish Robinson, Jake loses everything but the pride that propels him over to the new champ’s corner to boast, “You never knocked me down, Ray!” The ring is where Scorsese’s art is most alive, because it is where Jake lives, where he can do battle on equal terms, playing by hard men’s rules. Smoke, sweat, flesh and blood become Jackson Pollock abstractions as they pound home the essential bloodlust of those sweet sciences, prizefighting and moviemaking. Michael Chapman’s camera muscles into the action, peering from above, from below, from the combatant’s point of view, panning 360 degrees as a doomed fighter spins toward the canvas. Scorsese layers the sound track with grunts and screams, animal noises that seem to emanate from hell’s zoo. The boxing sequences are as violent, controlled, repulsive and exhilarating as anything in the genre. LaMotta was an animal a bull in the ring and a pig outside and Scorsese is true to both Jakes. Roger Ebert is not the only critic who thinks Raging Bull is the best film of the 1980s. He finally stumbled into glory when Martin Scorsese made a film of LaMotta’s life in black-and-white, like Body and Soul and Champion with Robert De Niro, at the peak of his feral majesty, in the title role. Within a year of retiring, he was convicted on a morals charge involving a 14-year-old prostitute and made a comeback of sorts as a road-show Rocky Graziano.

In his autobiography, Raging Bull, he says he “fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times I got diabetes.” He played rope-a-dope with the Mob. Jake LaMotta, the Bronx Bull, butted his way to the middleweight championship of boxing in 1949.

Cast: Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci Get This Movie

Raging bull boxing