He felt that if an essentially middle-class movie audience could be induced to empathize with these marginal, emotionally ignorant, and screechingly inarticulate people-La Motta, his wife, and his brother-it would be a good, discomfiting, perhaps even instructive experience. It had something to do, he now thinks, with “the primal emotions” the film trafficked in. I’m not certain that De Niro himself could, at the time, have fully explained his obsession with what was nominally a biopic and nominally a boxing picture, but was not quite either one. At the time-the late 70s-no one could understand what the actor saw in the life story of Jake La Motta, the brutal, yet curiously masochistic, middleweight boxing champion from 1949 to 1951, who may have been bull-like in the ring but was often more raving than raging when he was just trying to live his life. By which he means that it was Robert De Niro’s driving passion, long before it became Martin Scorsese’s common-consent greatest work. ‘It was Bob’s film,” says Irwin Winkler, the producer of Raging Bull.

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