This is a film about the escalation of domestic violence that begins with a family sitting around the kitchen table, bantering, bickering, goading, and then exploding into rage. Boxer Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) is no artist but, rather, a club brawler whose singular gift is a tolerance for absorbing his opponent’s punishment. Outside the ring, he is more likely to be the one providing the punishment, to his brother (Joe Pesci) and his platinum-blonde wife (Cathy Moriarty). In life there are no referees, no mandatory eight counts, no limits. For the actual LaMotta, whose real-life story inspired the film, brutality was a career as well as a compulsion; for those who watched his progress toward the world middleweight crown in 1949, it was blood sport masquerading as entertainment.

Scorsese has studied urban man’s connection to violence for almost fifty years in film after powerfully charged film. Raging Bull is his simplest and most direct demonstration of what turns tough guys into mayhem machines. It was shot in grainy black and white; its potent chiaroscuro is reminiscent of old tabloid photos of “the big fight.” The image that lingers longest from this painful, poignant film is the face of the middle-aged Jake, broken and bloated. He has suffered much and inflicted much more, yet, over a lifetime of pain, he has learned nothing.