The four movies that directly inspired Martin Scorsese’s ‘Raging Bull’
It’s no secret that the small American man who you often see at the Oscars, otherwise known as Martin Scorsese, is one of the best filmmakers of all time, gifting modern cinema with some of its greatest creations. Rubbing shoulders with such masters as Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Akira Kurosawa and Stanley Kubrick, Scorsese is certainly one of the masters, making such classics as Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Raging Bull.
While Taxi Driver and Goodfellas get the credit they deserve from the aforementioned trio of classic movies, Scorsese’s boxing flick Raging Bull often goes under the radar despite being one of his most complete masterpieces. A tale of regret and the dangers of human endeavour, the tale follows Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro), a real-life boxer whose dedication to his sport destroyed his private life.
Going on to inspire countless other movies, Scorsese himself took influence from the history of cinema to craft his unique sports movie and took to Letterboxd to break down the four companion films that he considers direct inspiration.
First on his list is the 1948 Abraham Polonsky film Force of Evil, an underrated arthouse classic of post-war American cinema that tells the story of an unethical lawyer wishing to help his older brother who gets tangled up with the wrong crowd. With John Garfield, Thomas Gomez, and Marie Windsor in the dazzling cast, it was Garfield’s performance in the lead role that really inspired Scorsese.
Elsewhere, to get some inspiration for the fight scenes, Scorsese turned to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1964 film Gertrud. “I wanted the fight scenes to feel as different from the rest of the action as the flashbacks in Gertrud feel from the main action,” he stated on his profile, “They shocked you onto a whole other plane, aesthetically and emotionally. I was looking for that kind of shock”.
Another direct inspiration was the eight-time Oscar-winning movie On the Waterfront by filmmaker Elia Kazan, which starred Marlon Brando as a former star of the boxing ring who struggles to live up to his name. Sharing many similarities to Scorsese’s movie, no less the iconic line “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender,” the Raging Bull director says of the classic: “On the Waterfront related directly to the core emotional relationship of Raging Bull, between Jake and his brother Joey”.
The final movie that Scorsese lists as a direct inspiration for his boxing movie is Luchino Visconti’s 1960 film Rocco and His Brothers. Telling the story of Rocco and his four brothers who are each searching for a new way of life in Milan after a sex worker comes between them, the film stars Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori and Claudia Cardinale and is considered a seminal film in Italian cinema history.
Take a look at the full list of the movies that inspired Raging Bull below.
The movies that inspired Raging Bull:
- Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948)
- Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964)
- On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)
- Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960)
