Split Decision

Some 40 years ago, I was working at a temp job in Manhattan shortly after I had graduated from college.

I forget the name of the place--I seem to recall it was on the Upper East Side--but I do remember this older man who worked there.

This was 1980 and Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese’s biopic about middleweight champion Jake LaMotta starring Robert DeNiro, was one of the top movies of the day.

I had seen the film and while I was impressed with the acting and the stunning black and white photography, I was less keen on the film than most of the critics.

The film seemed emotionally hollow to me and, in his review, a commentator on WCBS asked, “why is this guy raging?”

One of the most memorable-and most violent--scene in the film occurs when DeNiro, who portrayed LaMotta, mercilessly pounds the up-and-coming fighter Tony Janiro after LaMotta’s wife, Vickie, mentions quite innocently that the guy was good looking.

This drives the insanely jealous LaMotta to butcher the younger fighter’s face, leading one character to say of Janiro, “he ain’t pretty no more.”

When the film came out, there was talk of LaMotta seeing the error of his ways and becoming a better person. However, this older man wasn’t having that.

This man had seen the actual Janiro fight, which took place in Madison Square Garden on June 6, 1947.

He had witnessed LaMotta’s brutal destruction of his opponent, where, the Times said, Janiro “fell backwards ever so slowly and was unconscious from the force of (LaMotta’s) blow” as “his head hit the canvas with a thump.”

“Jake LaMotta was a fucking bum,” this fellow said.

Raging Bull would later be named the best film of the 1980s, but at the time, I wasn’t feeling it.

Well, this weekend, after more than four decades, I watched Raging Bull again, while also revisiting 29th Street, another Italian American themed film that came out in 1991.

Roll the Credits

And I found my opinion of the films had switched.

After seeing Raging Bull for a second time, I really appreciated what Scorsese was doing, while DeNiro was just brilliant. This time out, I didn’t care what made Jake rage; it was immaterial to the story.

The film has so many unforgettable images, particularly in the final fight with Sugar Ray Robinson, which takes on a nightmare quality as LaMotta is standing helpless against the ropes while his opponent slowly winds up to deliver the coup de grace.

Now, these are pretty awful people who are involved an awful profession, so you have to ask yourself if the film for you.

I recently saw Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, and while it was a great film, the people are just hideous, gorging on drugs, money, sex and power, like pigs.

I recommended this film, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, to my auntie and she bailed after 20 minutes.

“It was good, but I couldn’t take those people,” she said, and I knew exactly what she meant.

29th Street is not as well-known as Raging Bull—not even close—but its supporters, like myself--believe it’s underrated.

I still feel this film should’ve gotten more attention when it was in theaters, but this time out I didn’t like it as much as I had during my first viewing.

Directed by George Gallo, who wrote Midnight Run, (which I recently saw for the first time and didn’t particularly enjoy), 29th Street stars Danny Aiello and Anthony LaPaglia as father and son in a tough New York neighborhood.

There’s a lot to like here, particularly the opening, where LaPaglia is angrily throwing snowballs at a church on Christmas Eve. And the ending—which I will not reveal—was still effective.

But there was also a lot of yelling, and a bit too much melodrama, as many characters were little more than stereotypes.

I would still recommend 29th Street, but not as enthusiastically as some the people on IMDB apparently.

So, we have reached a split decision, where my admiration for Raging Ball increased, while 29th Street came up short.

I should mention that I had orginally planned to write a post about the Supreme Court's awful rulings that threatened to destroy this country, but the first draft was so negative I decided to scrub it.

And I'm trying to keep away fromb blogging about politics--at least for the time being.

I’ll be taking some time off to be amongst people instead of sitting in front of my widescreen.

Until we meet again...