But LaMotta’s story itself made that clear enough: rarely has such top-tier talent and major-studio investment been ploughed into a film about, pretty much any way you slice it, a grade-A asshole.Įven with LaMotta on board as an officially credited consultant, the finished film makes no attempt to conceal that truth. One wonders what their joint thought process was as they, too, set about talking Scorsese into Raging Bull: having experienced the director’s artistic particularities at their most extreme and expensive, they must have known another Rocky-style box-office fighter wasn’t on the cards. Producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler had recently made a fortune (and won an Oscar) by steering the underdog blockbuster Rocky right after that, they’d tasted failure by producing Scorsese’s still-underrated musical megabomb New York, New York. Robert De Niro latched on to it, convinced it would make an ideal vehicle for his gutsy talents over several years, his attempts to persuade Scorsese to develop it proved fruitless, with the sports-averse film-maker professing no interest in making a boxing film. Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader’s subject was a well-known one: former world middleweight champion boxer Jake LaMotta’s autobiography had been published in 1970, cementing a celebrity legend built on equal parts sporting prowess and turbulent personal chaos.

Yet the ne plus ultra of Scorsese’s fixation with, shall we say, challenging protagonists remains Raging Bull, the director’s first and greatest foray into the often fusty realm of the biopic. Even in more conventional story forms, he complicates things: Cape Fear muddied the victim-villain boundary between Robert De Niro’s psychotic killer and Nick Nolte’s corrupt family man, while The Age of Innocence honoured the spirit of Edith Wharton, denying audiences a clear outcome to root for in a love triangle between variously cool, compromised or manipulative participants.

From Taxi Driver through to The Wolf of Wall Street via The King of Comedy and Goodfellas, his cinema specialises in antihero figures as hard to love as they are to look away from. But it’s not so in every case, and few film-makers have dedicated themselves to testing the viewer’s sympathies as consistently as Martin Scorsese.

Jake lamotta