Who was the real ‘Raging Bull’ behind Martin Scorsese’s film?
Robert De Niro’s sole ‘Best Actor’ Oscar win to date was for his passion project, Raging Bull, a movie he took years to convince director and long-term collaborator Martin Scorses to make. In it, De Niro plays uncompromising middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta.
Unlike other boxing movies of the time, like Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky films and 1979’s The Champ starring Jon Voight, Raging Bull is very much a true story about a real boxer. It’s based on an eponymous book written by Jake LaMotta about his own life.
De Niro happened to read the book while working on The Godfather Part II in 1974 and became fascinated with LaMotta’s story. There was a real bruiser of a man who went from petty criminal to world champion but had been largely forgotten in lieu of celebrated contemporary Sugar Ray Robinson. His aggressive boxing style, refusal to lie down and apparent compulsion to fight seemed to make his sporting career an apt metaphor for his life outside the ring.
Once he finally got Scorsese on board, De Niro threw himself into the part, spending months training with LaMotta to become a middleweight boxer and repeatedly gaining and losing weight to reflect different moments in the real boxer’s life. The actor has since described the role as the most challenging he’s undertaken in his career.
Likewise, Scorsese went to great lengths to recreate historic boxing matches and accurately portray real-life situations described by LaMotta in his book. The painstaking level of detail in the production included changing the size of the boxing ring for different stages of LaMotta’s career to reflect the changing perspective brought on by the boxer’s deteriorating physical condition.
But while Scorsese might have adhered to historical records when it came to specific boxing matches, was the film truly representative of LaMotta’s life and career? How much of the real “Raging Bull” do we see De Niro play?
Were LaMotta and Sugar Ray Robinson really rivals?
Jake LaMotta had already fought and won 15 professional bouts as a teenager before suffering his first defeat to Jimmy Reeves. This is the point at which the movie begins, leaving out the teenage LaMotta’s time in juvenile detention prior to becoming a boxer after his arrest for a failed robbery attempt in which he almost killed a local bookie.
At the time the real LaMotta first fought Reeves, a 20-year-old Sugar Ray Robinson was fast making a name for himself with an undefeated professional record of 25 wins. The following year, the two met in the ring for the first time. Robinson won the bout by unanimous decision.
This isn’t something we’re shown in Raging Bull, although the first Robinson-LaMotta fight is mentioned in passing by a voiceover commentary during the scene of their second bout. By showing LaMotta’s historic victory in this second clash first, the movie plays a little with the narrative of the real-life rivalry between him and Robinson.
The two were indeed rivals, meeting a total of six times over the course of nine years. However, LaMotta only won one of the meetings. And he lost the most important one, the so-called “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre”, in which Robinson pummelled LaMotta relentlessly for 13 rounds and scored a technical knockout to take his world title belts.
This famous fight is the final one depicted in the movie, at the end of which a bloodied and swollen LaMotta stumbles over to Robinson and says, “You never got me down, Ray. You hear me?” In real life, these words were never spoken. Before his death, LaMotta claimed he didn’t say anything following the fight, claiming he had “too much respect for Ray”.
Did LaMotta accuse his brother of sleeping with his wife?
The short answer to this question is no. Jake LaMotta didn’t accuse his brother of sleeping with his wife, as he does in Raging Bull. That’s because Joey, Jake’s brother, played by Joe Pesci in the film, wasn’t the actual target of this paranoid accusation and the violence that ensued.
The real LaMotta did commit similar acts of thuggery, though, driven by jealous and possessive feelings towards his wife. However, his actual target was Pete Petrella, his best friend, who wasn’t featured in the movie. In fact, the character Joey is a composite of LaMotta’s real-life brother and the unrelated Pete rather than an accurate depiction of his behaviour towards his sibling.
Either way, even if certain specifics don’t match, what we see in the film seems to be a fair representation of the real Jake LaMotta. Actually, if you take his second wife Vikki’s word for it, it’s even a little too fair.
