[The end of] Raging Bull is a continuation of the scene with which the film begins, one where the aging Jake La Motta … rehearses a nightclub act he does after retiring from the ring. The scene is like a variation on that old cliché of having the fighter's life pass before his eyes in flashback between the counts of nine and ten, and this isn't the only instance in which the film seems to rely on fight-film conventions. Scorsese and at least one of his scriptwriters, Paul Schrader …, always work very much in the shadow of movie history. They're aware of the many ways that La Motta's story follows the standard plot line of boxing classics like Body and Soul. Like John Garfield in Robert Rossen's film, La Motta got mixed up with a dame and a gangster who both brought him grief. [This] film even suggests that La Motta himself is aware of such parallels between his life and the fighters in movies. The material Jake rehearses in that opening and closing scene includes a monologue based on Brando's speech to his brother—"I coulda' been a contenda, Chahley"—in On the Waterfront. The dive that La Motta once had to take was also set up by his own brother.
What sets Raging Bull apart, however, is the way that Scorsese and Schrader play against the grain of these fight-film conventions which their own film invokes…. In the movies, the hero of a fight film always has a character that develops slower than his body. But in the end, his character does develop. He changes dramatically. He grows up. He gets rid of the floozies and tells off the gangster. "Everybody dies," as John Garfield says to the fuming gangster for whom he has just refused to throw the title fight at the end of Body and Soul. The stoicism of this remark is a new-found wisdom for him, a radical transformation of his character.
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