RAGING BULL
Raging Bull is a 1980 American biographical sports drama film directed by Martin Scorsese. Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin‘s screenplay adapts Jake LaMotta‘s 1970 memoir Raging Bull: My Story. Robert De Niro stars as LaMotta, a former middleweight boxing champion whose turbulent personal life is beset by rage and jealousy. Scorsese dedicated the film to Armenian-American NYU film professor Haig P. Manoogian.[4] The supporting cast includes Joe Pesci, Cathy Moriarty, Theresa Saldana, Frank Vincent and Nicholas Colasanto (in his final film role).
Scorsese was initially reluctant to develop the project, although he eventually came to relate with LaMotta’s story. Schrader rewrote Martin’s first screenplay, and Scorsese and De Niro together made uncredited contributions thereafter. Pesci was a relatively unknown actor prior to the film, as was Moriarty, whom Pesci recommended. During principal photography, each of the boxing scenes was choreographed for a specific visual style, and De Niro gained approximately 60 pounds (27 kg) to portray LaMotta in his later years. Scorsese was exacting in the process of editing and mixing the film, expecting it to be his last major feature.
Raging Bull premiered in New York City on November 14, 1980, and was released in theaters on December 19. The film had a lukewarm box office of $23.4 million against its $18 million budget, and received mixed reviews from critics. While De Niro’s performance and the editing were widely acclaimed, its violent content received criticism. Raging Bull received a leading eight nominations at the 53rd Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won two: Best Actor for De Niro and Best Editing for Thelma Schoonmaker.
In the decades since its release, Raging Bull has come to be considered one of the greatest films ever made. In 1990, it became the first film to be selected in its first year of eligibility for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.[5] In 2007 the American Film Institute ranked Raging Bull as the fourth-greatest American movie of all time.