He was of course unforgettably played by De Niro but I thought in later years he more resembled that other Scorsese player Paul Sorvino, or maybe Tony Sirico, who played Paulie Walnuts in The Sopranos. In his later years, his broad, battered face looked like a shovel with a cheeky grin. After his boxing career, he became a C-lister celeb, with walk-ons on TV and the movies, and was actually arrested and briefly imprisoned for introducing men to underage girls at his club in Miami. There were continuous rumours, which LaMotta could hardly deny, that he took money to throw fights. He was always notorious for a brawling, bullying style in the ring, combined with a fanatical, granite-skulled ability to absorb punishment – very different from the willed rope-a-dope strategy of Ali. LaMotta’s shady reputation clouded his achievement. Scorsese brilliantly amplified LaMotta’s operatic self-pity and defiance. LaMotta had been a figure from the rackety underworld of the sport: he won the world middleweight title against the French fighter Marcel Cerdan in 1949, but had it taken away from him in a brutal bout with “Sugar” Ray Robinson in 1951, during which LaMotta was never knocked down – a fact which he insisted on as a kind of poignant victory of sorts. The result was the superb film Raging Bull in 1980, and so boxing history was made, or rather re-made. The speaker is controversial middleweight boxing champ Jake LaMotta, in his ghosted 1970 autobiography Raging Bull: My Story – a book which Robert De Niro read with fascination and put into Martin Scorsese’s hands in 1974.
![villain in ordinary movie villain in ordinary movie](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EjpXXh5XcAAuhll.jpg)
Not a good movie, either, jerky, with gaps in it, a string of poorly lit sequences, some of them with no beginning and no end.” Why it should be black-and-white, I don’t know, but it is.
#Villain in ordinary movie movie
“Now, sometimes, at night, when I think back, I feel like I’m looking at an old black-and-white movie of myself.