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Not Jack London's "abysmal brute" but Martin Scorsese's, an arena savagely sketched (a melee blurring ring and audience, not pacified by an organist playing "The Star-Spangled Banner"). "The Bronx Bull," Jake LaMotta and the bestial drive, Robert De Niro in a monumental study of physicality. The sporting life is a narrow one, the boxer lives for bouts and sees punching bags everywhere. His bellicosity rankles even the neighborhood mobsters, "the man's got a head of rock," his brother (Joe Pesci) plays frazzled mediator. The local blonde (Cathy Moriarty) likes his gym smell, Desdemona as Lana Turner and somebody to be owned more than loved—their courtship proceeds amid wooden crucifixes and Madonna portraits, their marriage withers in paranoia and battery. An offhand comment about a rival's handsomeness is enough to ensure a most barbarous pounding, along with a tell-tale slip: "I got a problem if I should fuck him or fight him." Weegee and Mascagni, Terry Malloy and Zampanò, the tabloid and the medieval in Scorsese's ultimate mortification of the cinematic flesh. A tremor of violence in even the quietest moments, ice for inflamed genitals and clenched fist alike. The gladiatorial stage is a mental zone, matches become Minnelli set-pieces even more than the songs in New York, New York: Slow-motion arterial geysers, amplified animalistic sounds, Sugar Ray Robinson's mighty mitt landing with a Biblical thud. ("Terrible punishment on the ropes," afterward the camera lingers on veiny cords dripping with blood.) Lean youth and bulbous middle-age, a dreamlike viscera throughout. Tête contre les murs in the stockade, a howl in the darkness, a brother's trajectory from "Hit me" to "Kiss me." "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" wonders Eliot. The purgatory of a nightclub dressing room is as proper a place as any for reflection, all things considered. Cinematography by Michael Chapman. With Nicholas Colasanto, Theresa Saldana, Frank Vincent, Lori Anne Flax, Mario Gallo, Frank Adonis, and Johnny Barnes. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |