Seeing Martin Scorsese's [Raging Bull] is like visiting a human zoo. That's certainly not to say that it's dull: good zoos are not dull. But the life we watch is stripped to elemental drives, with just enough décor of complexity—especially the heraldry of Catholicism—to underscore how elemental it basically is.

Scorsese specializes in the primitive aspects of urban life, with an emphasis on the colors and conflicts of Italian-Americans. American films have developed a latter-day line in this vein…. Most Italian-Americans may very understandably be tired of this canted concentration on gutter and crime, but they had better brace themselves: because here it is again and—which may irritate them further—done better than ever, done excellently. Scorsese has filmed the life of the boxer Jake La Motta, his rises and falls and eventual retirement, and this time Scorsese's work is purged of heavy symbolism, of film-school display, of facile portent. His directing is imaginative but controlled; egregious mannerisms have coalesced and evolved into a strong style. Some of Raging Bull is shocking, but all of it is irresistible. (p. 26)

[Most] cheering is Scorsese's growth. Little Italy, the ceaseless conflict between the support and the restrictions of Catholicism, the alliances and counteralliances of family and of the Mafia are still his home ground. He tells us in the sequence under the opening credits that he is dealing with provenance and struggle: while La Motta—in slow motion—prances around a ring in a robe, warming up, the sound-track lays on the "Intermezzo" from Cavalleria Rusticana. It's a splendid fixing of the film.

Contradictorily Scorsese has both purged and complicated his filmmaking. Taxi Driver was better made than Mean Streets … and Raging Bull is a huge leap. He is still avid to move film all the time, eager to energize his screen, but instead of his former frantic cutting from long shots to closeups and back, with some reverse shots thrown in, he now more subtly cuts to shots in which the camera is already moving forward slowly. In the fight sequences, he sometimes creates the effect of putting the camera in a glove, inside a battered head, and he always keeps prime the feeling of complete physical collision….

He has solved the visual problem of showing many fights; sometimes he varies with slow motion, sometimes with a series of stills, sometimes with isolated successive frames like the ones of astronauts on the moon. Never does he let us anticipate wearily that there are more fights to come; he never lets the matter get near tedium, and he never uses trickery that distracts. These sequences are legitimate and interesting variations, like a good composer's variations on a theme.

There are some bumps in the story line, and they may be connected with Scorsese's filmmaking process rather than the script…. Scorsese fell so in love with the making of this film, I think, with the actual shooting of scenes and sequences … that he found himself with more of a jigsaw to assemble in the editing room than do most directors. What holds this picture together more than its story line is its stylistic consistency, and style here means more than cinematic syntax, it means fire and personality….

[One] laurel that must rest on Scorsese's head alone is praise for the acting—that is, for the casting and for the guidance of the actors. Many scenes are played in a very low key, not as patent Paul-Muni preparations for outbursts but to draw us into privacies, to take us beneath the skin….

Some verses from John IX, 24-26, are appended at the end, but I don't grasp their relevance. More, I think it may be misguided to try to crystallize what the film is "about." Attempts have already been made to explain La Motta's character as reactive to the Italian-American atmosphere, but the script wouldn't have to be much different fundamentally if the protagonist were a black or an Irish Catholic or a Jew. La Motta is to be taken as given, a chunk of temperament like a character in a medieval morality play.

Finally Raging Bull is "about" what we see and hear, elevating its rather familiar materials, through conviction and the gush of life. After the socio-psychological explanations have limped on, this film, like some … good art works, is finally "about" the fact that it incontrovertibly exists and, by existing, moves us.