Word: bronx
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...film, he applies his theories more broadly, saying that large social groups--nations--only live to dominate and that they will stop at nothing, not murder, not genocide, not war. Resnais' camera then takes us for a sudden, completely unexpected, brutally chilling brief tour of the South Bronx. If Laborit's analyses seem a little too pat when concerned with the pointless, emotional cruelty we inflict on one another in our personal relationships, his dominance theory is terrifyingly precise when it deals with global kingdom-making. And Resnais' haunting last shot could convert many a cynic to Laborit's religion...
Black folks cheer his music; rednecks stomp and holler. He's a pop sensation, from The Bronx to the Hollywood Bowl, and a wonderful human being to boot. So where's the dramatic tension? It comes from an unlikely source: the 1925 Samson Raphaelson play and the Al Jolson movie version that ushered in the talkies. There is no Mammy in the new Jazz Singer; there's not even a momma. But the plot is the same: a young Orthodox cantor wants to become a singing star, straining to break the shackles of tradition even...
...like punching a provolone--and he had a left hook that could leave even Sugar Ray Robinson, maybe the best pound-for-pound fighter of all time, quivering on the mat like a dead leaf too long on the tree. He came out of the tough neighborhoods of the Bronx, and when it was over, he had an old middleweight title, a divorce, a bad morals rap in Miami, a gut like an ocean basin, and a comedy routine that got him places like the Jerry Lewis Telethon. He used to hang around bars like P.J. Clarke...
SOMEWHERE IN THE FILMING of Raging Bull, though, Jake LaMotta disappeared--literally, he was kicked off the set, but in another sense, the real LaMotta didn't fit Scorsese's purpose. Raging Bull is about a parochial way of life, the mores of Italians moving up in the Bronx after the war. As a period piece, the movie is astonishing in its particularity--every detail is right, from the shirt collars to the old-style Kleenex box in LaMotta's bathroom; from the night at the Copacabana (where all the Italians of that era used to go for their...
Raging Bull is not merely the Jake LaMotta story, or a provincial vignette of life in the Bronx (although it functions on those levels); neither is it America; rather, it is a look at Scorsese's demons, with America serving as a prop. Violence extends beyond the ring to the crowd (where a woman is trampled in the crowd riot) to the church social hall (where drunks are thrown out by bouncers) to the Copacabana (site of a huge brawl) to the kitchen and dinner table. Cathy Moriarty, stunning in her debut as LaMotta's wife Vicki, is as beautiful...