How not to manage success

Press, 20 April 1981, Page 8

How not to manage success

AT THE CINEMA

Hans Petrovic

RAGING BULL Directed by Martin Scorsese Screenplay by Paul Schrader and Mardick Martin Robert De Niro certainly deserves this year’s best actor Academy Award for his performance, nay, incarnation as the troubled, middleweight boxing champion, Jake La Motta, in “Raging Bull” (Westend). De Niro as the callow- street-fighter-turned-top-boxer is remarkable — right from the early years in the ring to the over-weight slob who spends his time after the final bell trying to keep a big body and small soul together in a nightclub. The Bronx-born boxer won the championship in 1948, but afterwards lost his family and his self-respect. “Raging Bull” traces La Motta’s life through a bad marriage, his love for a blonde beauty who maddens him with jealousy, and collaboration with gangsters in throwing a fight. In preparation for the part, De Niro went through 12 months of such rigorous training, with the original La Motta that the actor could virtually consider himself a ranking middleweight. „ To fully fill the latter half of the moVie, De Niro even went on a four-month eating binge to raise his weight from 73kg to 98kg. (Which would not have been half the fun Peter Finch had going on a beer diet to put on sufficient weight for his role as Oscar Wilde in “The Man With the Green . Carnation.”)' .' ■ ;’. . y- - After this depressing; exj.ercise — all in the name of ‘/duty — De Niro had to go on ;a four-month diet to return his weight, to “normal.’’‘ 5

As it turns out, De Niro's performance in "Raging Bull” is so good that you can not help but dislike him. The same applies to the film itself. Everything is so A authentically (and sometimes} gut-wrenchi'ngly) done — th'sl fighting, family, and 1950/w scenes in general — that oncj| feels one has gone back to .tS black and white mobster® movie, Abbott and Costello, or another episode of television's “I Was a Communist

for the F. 8.1." of the time. But one wonders why one has gone back on cinema's time-machine to watch a chronicle of the doings of a thoroughly unpleasant specimen of humanity —- hitting out and being thumped, abusing others and himself; to watch a big man going to the dogs. Such has been the style of at least two other films by the director, Martin Scorsese, in collaborator

with De Niro: "Mean Streets.” and "Taxi Driver.” These were hard-hitting, below-the-belt looks at low life. "Raging Bull” continues on in the same genre. All three have been excellent films, but one wonders if today’s audiences are prepared for this kind of fare for an evenings entertainment. Although already well recognised, I feel that Scorsese’s work will eventually find its right place in the fields of “art” or "cult” films. Scorsese’s choice of black and white for the film has raised many questions, particularly from people who find films which are not in colour to-be "boring.!’ However, the following excerpt from Jake La Motta's biography. “Raging Bull.” and quoted by “Time” magazine last year, should well explain the decision against using colour, and also the often disjointed narrative throughout the movie. La Motta says: “Now, sametimes, at night, when I think back. I feel I'm looking at an old black and white movie of myself. Why it should be black and white I don’t, know, but it is. Not a good movie, either, jerky, with gaps in it, a string of poorly-lit sequences, some of them with no beginning and some with no end. . . And almost all of it happens at night, os if I lived my whole . life at night.” The single scene, beside the swimming pool, where some splotchy colour is used, can be explained by its being based on some of La Motta’s home movies.