Raging Bull opens on a lone figure in a hooded robe, shadow-boxing in slow motion through a haze of cigarette smoke while Mascagni’s strings rise over an empty ring. It is the most graceful image Martin Scorsese ever built, and it introduces the least graceful man he ever filmed. Robert De Niro plays Jake LaMotta, a middleweight who fought as though pain were the only language he trusted, and the picture follows him as he turns that same violence on everyone who comes close.

Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman shot the film in black and white, draining boxing of its glamour until only skin, sweat and the hard geometry of the ropes remain. The absence of colour is not nostalgia. It is a way of looking at LaMotta without letting the spectacle flatter him.

The fights, the noise, the silence

Adapted by Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin from LaMotta’s own memoir, the film refuses the clean arc of a sports story. The boxer rises, grows jealous, suspects his wife and his brother, and dismantles every bond he has with the same reflexes that made him champion. Thelma Schoonmaker edits the bouts into something closer to a nightmare than a match — flashbulbs detonate, ropes groan, the crowd noise gives way to the roar of animals. Then the camera goes still, and the violence simply moves into the kitchen.

De Niro becomes the body

De Niro’s performance remains the film’s centre of gravity. He trained until he could fight real bouts, then gained close to thirty kilos to play the older, bloated LaMotta telling jokes in a nightclub. The change is not a stunt; it is the argument. By the end the champion’s body has become the prison the film has been describing all along. The work won De Niro the Oscar for Best Actor, and it introduced two faces who would define a register of American film: Joe Pesci as the brother who manages him, and Cathy Moriarty as the wife he cannot stop interrogating.

Why it endures

More than forty years on, Raging Bull is routinely named the finest American film of its decade, and the reasons sit in every frame. Schoonmaker won the Oscar for cutting the fights into pure sensation. Scorsese, who has said he made the picture believing it might be his last, poured a convert’s intensity into a story about guilt and the impossibility of grace. The closing scene — LaMotta alone before a dressing-room mirror, reciting Brando’s ‘I coulda been a contender’ to his own reflection — turns the whole film into a confession.

Raging Bull never redeems Jake LaMotta, and it never pretends to. What it offers instead is the rarer thing: a film that finds beauty in punishment without excusing it, and a champion who learns, too late, that the hardest opponent was always in the mirror.