How does the story of the Pharisees, the unnamed Christ, and the healed man connect to LaMotta, a brutish, sexually obsessive, sometimes relentlessly self-destructive boxer who, in the picture’s final shot seems to have achieved, if not serenity, at least some normative sense concerning who he is and where he’s at-a state he is never in at any other point during the galvanic film? Certainly, he doesn’t represent the Pharisees. Manoogian was a professor at New York University, an architect of the school’s film program, and an important mentor to Scorsese, who studied and, for a time, taught at NYU. “ Al l I know is this: onc e I was blind and now I can see.”Īfter which comes the source citation, and then the movie’s dedication:

“Whethe r or not he is a sinner, I do not know,” th e man replied. So, for the second time, summone d th e man who had been blind and said: A series of end titles, in white typeface that fades to gray, quote the New English Bible’s Gospel of John, chapter nine, verses 24 to 26: What follows has tended to baffle, and even confound, many of R aging Bull’s admirers, and certainly critics who reacted skeptically to the movie. The sign outside the venue he’s working, the Barbizon-Plaza, advertises “An Evening With Jake LaMotta, featuring the works of Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling, Shakespeare, Budd Schulberg, Tennessee Williams, Tonight.” The scene, so complex in its poignant artistic resonances (LaMotta, played by Robert De Niro, haltingly repeats the “I coulda been a contender” speech originally spoken by Marlon Brando in Kazan and Schulberg’s On the Waterfront) is a justifiably famous one. The Bronx-born LaMotta, a not particularly articulate man, is now in the middle of an unlikely second career as an entertainer and reciter.

At the end of Raging Bull, the 1980 movie directed by Martin Scorsese, its protagonist, the onetime boxer Jake LaMotta, is shown in a nightclub dressing room, preparing for a show.

Raging bull in colour