The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Martin Scorsese · a film · 1980 · 129 minutes
Mode
Biographical boxing drama turned against its genre; domestic chamber drama and expressionist fight film in one
Mythos
The fall of the champion and the penance after it; the brothers, keeper and kept; the body offered on the ropes
Phase
Twenty-three years, 1941 to 1964, told as one flashback inside a frame, in stations years apart
Presentation
Film; black and white, with one sequence of colour home movies; eight bouts staged; pre-existing music, Mascagni at the titles
Register
From Joey’s banter over a steak to the cell wall; flat, close domestic scenes against fights shot from inside the ring
Scale
One man, one borough, ten years of bouts
Governing Proposition
A middleweight from the Bronx fights his way to a title and loses everything he possesses through the fear of losing it: his brother, his wife, his body. The wager of the film is that a man with no words for what is in him can be known through what he does, and that the ring, filmed from inside, is the one place where his interior can be seen.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on a man alone in a ring. Behind the ropes, in a hooded robe, he shadowboxes in slow motion while the intermezzo from Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana plays. There is no opponent, no blow lands, and the ropes stand between him and the camera. It is the stillest violence in the film, and the only time the ring is shown as a place of grace. Then 1964, a dressing room in New York: Jake LaMotta, heavy, rehearsing a rhymed recitation for a stage act. The fighter has become a performer, and what he performs is verse he has to learn.
From there the film goes back twenty-three years and does not return until its end. Cleveland, 1941: LaMotta puts Jimmy Reeves down and loses the decision, and the hall riots. It is the first station, and it states the condition the rest will play out, a man who wins and is still not given what he has won. Between this and 1958 the film moves in stations a few years apart, each announced by a title, and what lies between them is simply left out. The war passes without the war. The courtship of a wife takes a few scenes. A life is shown not as a development but as a series of places where something has already happened.
Martin Scorsese directed it from a screenplay by Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin, after the memoir LaMotta published with Joseph Carter and Peter Savage in 1970. Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff produced it for United Artists, and it was released in November 1980. Michael Chapman photographed it in black and white throughout, with one exception, and Thelma Schoonmaker edited it. The music is pre-existing: Mascagni at the titles, period popular recordings under the flats and the clubs. Eight bouts are staged across ten years, several of them a minute or two long. A boxing film, it gives little of its time to boxing, and when it does it goes inside the ropes and stays there.
Movement II
The Bronx, 1941. Jake and his first wife fight over a steak in a cramped flat, and the quarrel sets the film’s grammar outside the ring: plain set-ups held at length, the talk overlapping and repeating, voices raised at nothing. His brother Joey, played by Joe Pesci, manages him and argues with him as an equal. Jake complains of his “small hands”, and the grievance is lodged in his own body. Then he makes Joey hit him in the face, again and again. The demand for punishment comes before there is any guilt to explain it.
At the open-air pool he sees Vickie through the fence. She is said in dialogue to be fifteen. Cathy Moriarty plays her, in her first film, and the camera looks at her as Jake does, which is almost the only way the film will look at her. Possession starts here, before there is anything to possess. Around the pool and the social club stand the neighbourhood’s men: Salvy, played by Frank Vincent, and Tommy Como, played by Nicholas Colasanto, through whom the mob holds the sport. Jake takes Vickie out.
Two bouts with Sugar Ray Robinson follow, a win and, three weeks later, a loss on a decision. Before a fight Jake breaks off with Vickie and pours iced water into his shorts. Abstinence is training, and the body is already the ground on which everything is fought: appetite against discipline, desire against the weight he has to make. It is the first time the film shows him turning his body against itself on purpose. The scene is comic, and it is not released from what it means.
Movement III
Then the one passage in colour. Home movies show the marriage to Vickie, Joey’s wedding, the houses and the children, cut against black-and-white still photographs of bouts captioned with opponents and years. The years go by in minutes, and they are the happy years. The one passage where the marriage looks happy is the one in the form people use to record happiness, so that the only record of it is the record a man would show. When the colour ends, the film does not come back to that happiness.
Vickie calls Tony Janiro, a younger fighter, good-looking. In the ring Jake disfigures him. The bout ends on a spray of blood over the ringside, the jealousy made visible on a man who has done nothing but be looked at. At the Copacabana Joey sees Vickie at Salvy’s table, and outside he beats Salvy with a car door. The brothers share the code of the neighbourhood, honour and possession, and it is the only language either of them has. The violence passes from one to the other without a word of explanation.
The Billy Fox bout is thrown on the mob’s terms. Jake will not fall. He stands and loses on his feet, taking the punches rather than going down, and afterwards he weeps in the dressing room. It is the only time in the film he gives in, and the only time he weeps. The beating he takes willingly. What he cannot bear is to have bent to another man’s will, and the film gives him no words for it, only the weeping and the room.
Movement IV
Detroit, 1949: outdoors, LaMotta beats Marcel Cerdan and takes the middleweight title. The film gives the summit of his career one bout and moves on. The next station is the house, a year later. Jake fiddles with the television, whose picture will not come in, and the suspicion he has carried since the pool turns on his brother. He accuses Joey, goes to Joey’s home and beats him in front of his family, and strikes Vickie. The man who could only possess has turned on the brother who kept him.
Against Laurent Dauthuille, losing on points, he knocks the other man out in the fifteenth round. Then Chicago, 14 February 1951, and the last fight with Robinson. The approach is slowed and the sound drops out. Jake stands on the ropes and lets himself be beaten, the blows landing in near silence, the blood dripping from the ropes. When it is over he says to Robinson, “You never got me down, Ray.” He has lost the fight and kept the one thing he would not give up: he did not fall.
The fight answers the Janiro bout. The man who disfigured a younger fighter because his wife had praised his looks now offers his own face to be broken, and the film sets the two side by side without comment. Possession and self-punishment are one drive, outward at those he loves and inward at himself. The camera never takes the crowd’s distance for long. The ring is the one place where what is in him can be seen, and the film makes it a different place each time: its size seems to change, its speed changes, the blows are built from sources that are not fists, and a single flashbulb lands like a shot.
Movement V
Miami, years later. Retired and heavy, Jake is a nightclub host, telling jokes from the stage. Production stopped for some months while De Niro gained the weight for these scenes, and the body is now the film’s calendar. Vickie leaves him. He is arrested over under-age girls, and he takes a hammer to his championship belt. In the cell he beats his fists and head against the wall in the dark. The violence that went out at others and in at himself has nowhere left to go but the wall.
Back in New York in 1958, playing a cheap club, he meets Joey in a car park and embraces him, and Joey half refuses the embrace. Nothing is mended, and the film does not say whether it can be. Then it is where it began, in 1964, in the dressing room. Jake recites Brando’s speech from On the Waterfront to the mirror, another man’s lament, flatly and entire. He tells himself, “Go get ’em, champ,” and “I’m the boss,” and shadowboxes. Whether this is recognition or performance the film leaves open. He has learned his lines.
The end titles give John 9:24–26 in the New English Bible, ending “once I was blind and now I can see”, and a dedication to Haig P. Manoogian, Scorsese’s teacher. The redemption the verse names is attached, not enacted, and the last scene leaves it in doubt. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won two, for De Niro as actor and for Schoonmaker’s editing; in 1990 it was selected for the National Film Registry. The questions it leaves stay open: what drove the jealousy, whose blindness the verse means, and whether the man in the mirror sees himself or only another part to play.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and ellipsis, which carry the film’s necessity, and the subtractive test finds little to take. Each station is required: the Reeves decision, a man who wins and is not given what he has won; the “small hands”, which state the grievance; the pool, which sets possession going; the Fox fight, the one time he gives in and the one time he weeps; the television, where jealousy turns on the brother. Ellipsis does the cutting first: the war, the courtship and most of the title reign are absent. What gives is the Miami stretch. The club monologues and the under-age girls run on episode by episode, and a version that went from Vickie leaving to the cell would lose little.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a man who can only possess fears loss in everything he possesses, and his violence goes outward at those he loves and inward at himself, as a demand for punishment. The structure shows the two as one drive. The man who disfigures Janiro because his wife called him good-looking stands on the ropes against Robinson, lets himself be beaten, and says, “You never got me down, Ray.” It discloses, too, the brotherhood as the real marriage. Held near the gate by how little it lets in from outside Jake: Vickie is seen almost wholly as he sees her, and the film shows behaviour and declines to explain it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is dreadful, and it is concentrated in the ring: the hooded figure of the titles, shadowboxing in slow motion behind the ropes to the intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana; the Janiro beating, ending on a spray of blood over the ringside; the last Robinson bout, the approach slowed, the sound dropping out, blood dripping from the ropes; the cell, fists and head against the wall in the dark; the recitation of Brando to a mirror, flat and enormous at once. Height is near the top in each. Frequency is lower. The domestic scenes are kept deliberately ugly and unelevated, with long stretches between the rises. That is design, but frequency counts.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The particular is extreme: one man, one borough, ten years of bouts. The archetype reaches it, and in part it is built. The fall of the champion and the penance after it are the film’s order: pride, the title, the beating of the brother, the last bout, the cell, a man rehearsing lines before a mirror. That arc is load-bearing and carries the axis over the gate. The rest is evoked by image. The brothers, keeper and kept, carry Cain and Abel without naming them; the body on the ropes, arms spread, blood running, summons the Passion. Held a tenth above the bar because the redemption that would close the structure is withheld: the epigraph from John, “once I was blind and now I can see”, is attached, not enacted.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inherited form is the boxing picture and its plot of rise, temptation and redemption, from Body and Soul (1947) to Rocky (1976), four years before. The departures compound: a sports biography with no redemptive bout and a hero it will not excuse; black and white in 1980; fights rendered as interior states, unreadable as sport; domestic scenes played long and close. The stake was real: Scorsese came to it from the commercial failure of New York, New York (1977), with a prestige picture built on a repellent hero. Held below the top by precedent: The Set-Up (1949) and Fat City (1972) had taken the glamour out of the ring, Taxi Driver (1976) had centred an unexcused man, and the producers came to it from Rocky.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Jake has no words for what is in him, and the film gives him none; it gives him a form with two grammars. Outside the ring, scenes are played in plain, often static set-ups, at length, the talk overlapping. Inside it the film turns expressionist: speeds change, the camera goes where no spectator could stand, sound is stripped out or distorted. The ring is the one place his interior can be seen, and the form alone carries that knowledge. The colour home movies are a third term, the happy marriage in the form people use to record happiness. A step from the top: the frame is conventional biographical grammar, and Miami is told in ordinary scene form.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence over promise, and there are forty-six years of it: continuous study in the literature on Scorsese, on masculinity on screen and on Catholic imagery in film. The questions that stay open are the film’s own. Is the ending recognition or performance, a man reciting another man’s lament to a mirror and then telling himself he is the boss? What does the epigraph claim, and of whom, the fighter or the maker? What drives the jealousy, including the charge in his remarks about other fighters’ looks? The formal yield is as deep: each fight is cut to its own design and rewards study shot by shot. Held below the top because its questions are narrower than a wider world’s, and part of its depth is refusal, which invites projection.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Released in 1980, so force and reach are scored together. The force is a reorganisation of how violence is staged in narrative film: as subjective experience, built in the cutting room from speed, sound and silence rather than shown as contest. It fixed, too, a model of performance as bodily transformation. Its field is the staging of violence and the craft of the actor, not the grammar of narrative film. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the boxing film since is commonly read in its shadow, from The Fighter (2010) to Creed (2015); the actor’s weight gain became a recognised practice and a byword; and the cutting of violence, carried by Scorsese and Schoonmaker into Goodfellas (1990), shaped a generation of crime films.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across forty-six years: continuous exhibition, home editions in every format, a restoration, and selection for the National Film Registry in 1990. Beyond that record it is scored on what the film is built to bear, and so partly as forecast. It is unusually well made for lasting. A period film on release, set from 1941 to 1964, it has no 1980 surface to date: no fashion, slang or technology of the year it was made. Black and white removes the colour stock that dates most American films of its decade. The one surface exposed to time is the subject: a film so far inside a man’s violence against women can come to be read as complicity rather than exposure.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Michael Chapman’s photography holds the deep greys of the flats and the hot white of the ring under flashbulbs. Thelma Schoonmaker cuts each fight to its own rhythm, so that no two are the same experience, and cuts the home movies against captioned stills of bouts. The sound removes the crowd, lands a single flashbulb like a shot and builds the blows from sources that are not fists. De Niro uses his whole body as an instrument, lean at the start and swollen at the end; Pesci is his equal in every scene they share; Cathy Moriarty, in her first film, holds the camera without effort. The costs are small: some domestic scenes run loose, and Miami is shot with less invention.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The two most distant elements are the expressionist fights and the flat, close domestic scenes, with the colour home movies and the 1964 frame beside them. One law governs all four: the world is shown at the pitch of Jake’s sensibility, and violence is the same act in the ring, at the dinner table and against the cell wall. The fights are the kitchen quarrels made visible; the home movies are the only record of the marriage he would show. The tonal range is wide, from Joey’s comic banter to the cell, and the comedy is never released from menace. What holds the axis here is the range of the world, not the law: narrowness is not coherence, and part of this coherence is the narrowness of one consciousness.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The orders the film holds are integrated through one life. The body, trained, damaged and swollen, is the calendar of the second half. The family, two marriages and the brothers, is the centre. Labour is boxing as a trade; institutions enter through the mob’s hold on the sport, in Tommy Como and the Fox fight; the neighbourhood through its code of honour and possession; celebrity through the nightclub act; the law through the cell; the sacred through the imagery, named only in the epigraph. What keeps the axis lowest is what is absent or withheld: history, since the war passes off screen; the state; the natural order; and consciousness, which the film declines to open. One life, held with great density and small reach.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier IV — Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.5, The Living Form at 9.3 and The Inner Law at 9.0. A command of the medium that bears weight from the photography to the sound, a form with two grammars in which the ring is the one place the hero’s interior can be seen, and one law of violence across the ring, the table and the cell.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.7 — one life held with great density and small reach, with history, the state and the natural order absent and consciousness withheld. Below the rest, The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6: a disclosure that sees the wife almost only as the husband sees her, and a fall and penance built whose redemption is named rather than enacted.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.3, The Made at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.7, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7, The Unconcealment at 8.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.6, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.8 against 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Raging Bull as released in the United States in November 1980, 129 minutes, from the titles to the end titles: directed by Martin Scorsese from a screenplay by Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin, photographed by Michael Chapman and edited by Thelma Schoonmaker, for United Artists. No print, script or recording was consulted. The memoir and the historical Jake LaMotta are not part of the work; where the film departs from his record, the film is the object, and nothing the memoir explains is imported. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and kept short. Figures that could not be verified, among them the share of the running time given to boxing, the size of the weight gain, the budget and the years given on screen for some bouts, are not given.