WHAT: Raging Bull (1980, 4K DCP)
WHEN: Friday, January 16, 2026 1 PM & 7 PM
WHERE: Pickwick Theatre, Park Ridge, IL
HOW MUCH: $12/$10 advance or $10 for the 1 PM matinee
Advance Tickets: Click Here and select date and time (7 PM).
“I’m gonna win. There’s no way I’m goin’ down. I don’t go down for nobody.” ~ Jake LaMotta
You can find director Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980) on numerous lists of the greatest films of all time, but on January 16, 2026, you’ll find it on the Pickwick Theatre’s Mega-screen. Nominated for eight Academy Awards (including Best Picture), it won two: Best Film Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker) and Best Actor (Robert De Niro). Raging Bull, like many of Scorsese’s films, is one of the absolute essentials of American cinema, a must-see theatrical experience that will be presented in a rare Friday screening. Join us for “Friday Night Fights” and step into the ring as we journey back to the tumultuous life of fighter Jake LaMotta.
Raging Bull is based on LaMotta’s autobiography of the same name, which was originally published in 1970. The book details his hard life on the mean streets of the Bronx, his days in reform school, and his turn into boxing, which eventually led him to becoming the middleweight champion of the world in 1949. The book is written in the voice of a former street kid who had a rough life and did a lot of bad things. But it’s authentic and not the product of a ghost writer. The story, more than its literary style, caught the attention of actor Robert De Niro while he was making The Godfather Part II (1974).
De Niro brought the story to Martin Scorsese, who admittedly was not a fan of sports much less boxing. Scorsese initially passed and the story went to Mardik Martin, who would go on to co-write the screenplay with Paul Schrader. De Niro pitched the idea to producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, both of whom were responsible for one of the biggest hits of the 1970s, Rocky (1976). In fact, Rocky‘s success would be used as leverage with United Artists to help green-light Raging Bull since the studio was looking for another Rocky. However, Chartoff and Winkler were interested only if Scorsese was onboard with the project.
At this time, Martin Scorsese was going through a rough stretch in his life, both professionally and personally. With the expectation that this could very well be his last Hollywood movie, he finally accepted the assignment. His change of heart stemmed from a deeper understanding of the Jake LaMotta character. He found a connection to him and could relate to the highs and lows that made up the famed boxer’s life. For Scorsese, the boxing ring was everywhere and became “an allegory for whatever you do in life.” He found a parallel between life in the ring and his life making movies. And at this point in his life, he felt he was nearly down for the count. By the end of 1978, Scorsese had developed the screenplay with De Niro after Paul Schrader’s second draft. Together, they made the story their own while retaining the general structure of Schrader’s work.
The pre-production included some 8mm color film that depicted De Niro sparring in a ring. This footage, along with Jake LaMotta’s own 16mm home movies, inspired the color scenes in the film that show glimpses of the LaMotta home life. (Scorsese did struggle to make these ‘home movies’ look as amateurish as the real thing.) However, the decision was made to shoot Raging Bull in black and white for period authenticity, among other reasons. It gave the film more of an evocation of that period– of Friday Night Fights on television or newspaper tabloids with photos of the old-time fighters in black and white. It also separated the film from other contemporary boxing films like Rocky (1976). Besides creating more of a timeless feel, the black and white cinematography (by Michael Chapman) eliminated the garishness of seeing blood in the ring. Scorsese’s mentor, British director Michael Powell, was the one who originally inspired Scorsese to take this route after seeing color footage of De Niro in the ring and commenting that his gloves were the wrong color. Another determining factor in Scorsese’s decision to photograph it in black and white was the unreliability of color film stock at this time, which had a tendency to fade.
Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) is a middleweight contender, but he’ll never get his chance to be a champion unless he plays ball with the mob. Besides this professional conflict, LaMotta has inner demons that tear him apart. In addition to his anger issues, he is paranoid of anyone in contact with his beautiful wife, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty). Jake eventually agrees to take a fall in order to get his title shot. He becomes middleweight champ, but his personal life disintegrates. He even alienates his own brother, Joey (Joe Pesci). After Jake’s boxing defeat and retirement, Jake’s life continues to slide into divorce, scandal and prison.
The film is framed by scenes depicting an older and heavier Jake, who is now operating a nightclub in Florida. He entertains his guests with stories and jokes and survives in business on account of his name. One of the most memorable aspects of this portrayal of Jake LaMotta is De Niro’s physical transformation. He gained 60 pounds in order to become the older Jake– going from 152 to 212. He didn’t wear a padded suit, and this was years before any computer-generated trickery. For De Niro, he needed to feel like LaMotta, who always struggled to “make the weight” come fight time. It was a way for the actor to really understand the character. But De Niro was just as convincing as a fighter. Jake LaMotta himself, who served as a technical advisor on the boxing sequences, insisted that De Niro could’ve easily become a middleweight fighter if he had wanted to.
Joe Pesci, who played Jake’s brother Joey, was a relative unknown in movies and was brought on by De Niro, who had seen him in a low budget movie called The Death Collector (1976). Raging Bull would be a breakthrough role for Pesci, and he would go on to co-star in some of Scorsese’s biggest films with De Niro, including Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995). The character of Joey combined aspects of LaMotta’s real-life friend Pete Savage, who was one of the writers of the original book and appears in the movie in a bar scene. It would be a pivotal role because for Scorsese, the story was about two brothers just as much as it was about boxing. Pesci, in turn, recommended Cathy Moriarty, who was even more of an unknown at this time, but she earned the role of Jake’s wife, Vickie. She had what was regarded as a ‘quiet authority’ about her. From being around De Niro, she learned a lot about acting, particularly how to listen and how to improvise on set. Though Moriarty, Pesci, and Frank Vincent (a musician Pesci knew who was cast as local hood Salvy) all gave excellent performances, Scorsese took some criticism in the industry for casting so many new faces as opposed to established actors.
Raging Bull is considered one of the best edited films of all time, deservedly winning an Oscar for Thelma Schoonmaker. Some of the film’s most memorable scenes are the boxing sequences, which took 8-10 weeks to shoot in a studio. These sequences were based on elaborate storyboards that Scorsese had designed. Unlike other boxing movies where the action cuts from inside the ring to the perspective of the crowd, the action in Raging Bull is mostly limited to the confines of the ring. By staying in the ring it gave Scorsese license to distort. The ring was altered for dramatic affect. For instance, in one sequence they physically elongated the ring to deliberately distort perspective.
One of the few times the viewer is actually taken into the crowd is at the outset of LaMotta’s championship fight. This sequence begins with a brilliant Steadycam shot of his walk through a stadium tunnel and then into the crowd– all done in one continuous shot with the aid of a cherry picker that allowed the cameraman to ascend. Each fight in Raging Bull is shot differently and has its own rhythm and look. For one of the matches, Scorsese had a fire going under the camera lens in order to create a smoky, mirage-like effect. On the other hand, LaMotta’s final fight with Sugar Ray Robinson, with the quick edits, was actually inspired by the rhythm of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Thelma Schoonmaker has insisted that her Oscar for this movie was really Marty’s. His style, his direction and camera movements, were all part of the editing process.
The action in these sequences, which Scorsese envisioned as musical numbers, was edited in a different manner from the rest of the film. Sometimes time seems to slow only to build up again. Some shots call attention to specific details, such as the blood dripping from the rope– a shot rendered less ugly in black and white. This and the shot of a blood-soaked sponge being squeezed out on LaMotta’s body were images that inspired Scorsese when he was first attending boxing matches at Madison Square Garden while doing research. Hand in hand with the film editing was the sound editing by Frank Warner, who had won an Academy Award for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). One of his memorable contributions was the use of animal sounds heard during the fights, such as that of an elephant or a horse. Whether it was the sound of an old, news camera flash bulb or the noises on a New York street, Warner’s contributions helped make Raging Bull an aural success.
Adding considerably to the overall atmosphere of the film is the music. Scorsese incorporated period music from the 1940s. It’s not as forcefully used as in some of his later films. Here, it might be heard in the background of the tenement life he so vividly recreated. The film’s most famous selection, though, was the intermezzo from Pietro Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria Rusticana, which is played over the main titles (as De Niro shadow boxes at 120 frames a second). This is the theme to Raging Bull. Music is heard throughout other sequences that Scorsese pulled from his own youth, whether they were set in a nightclub like the Copacabana or a church social dance.
The story’s theme is the brutality of boxing and how that carries over into one’s personal life. Violence wasn’t something that could be turned on or off for Jake LaMotta, and in the end, he punished everyone around him. There was the paranoia and the obsessiveness, which Scorsese was able to capture using slow motion to fixate on certain details from LaMotta’s perspective. There were additional factors in LaMotta’s mental makeup that attributed to the person he was. Though he was a hero and legend for many in the Bronx area and around the world, he was far from being a role model. He had plenty of flaws, but the complexity of the character is what initially drew De Niro to him when he first read the book.
For those who have read the autobiography, it reads like something that could’ve been a film noir in the 1940s, but there’s also a Boys Town dimension to it with a religious connection that is never touched upon in the film. However, the film does depict that pivotal moment in LaMotta’s real life when he hit rock bottom– the Dade County jail cell in which De Niro, lit only by a couple shafts of light, starts punching the prison wall. The book explains that after this turning point, he learned to stop being afraid. The literary Jake got to the root of what the film depicts: an almost masochistic desire to self-punish in the ring for the things he did in life. As great as Raging Bull the film is, it’s not the whole story of who Jake LaMotta was. The filmmakers simply wanted to be true to the character and capture his passion and skill. But to have told the story in a traditional way, whereby the viewer sees the root causes of his behavior, would have given too much away. Scorsese took a more complex approach and wanted his audience to accept the character as he already was without trying to explain him.
Raging Bull never became the box office success that the feel-good story of Rocky was, but the film did get its money back. (De Niro would later square off with Sylvester Stallone as an aging bull in the 2013 comedy, Grudge Match.) About a decade after Raging Bull‘s release, critics began to recognize the film to an even greater extent– to the point where it was now acknowledged as one of the truly exceptional films of the 1980s– the “best film of the decade” to some reviewers. It’s certainly one of the best boxing films ever made and one of Scorsese’s masterworks.
~MCH
Raging Bull: 1980 vs. 2026
