SOURCE: "Hell Up in the Bronx," in Sight and Sound, Vol. 50, No. 2, Spring, 1981, pp. 128-32.

In the following excerpt from an essay in which he also discusses the work of John Cassavetes, Combs analyzes Raging Bull, attempting to reconcile the film's power with its marked avoidance of standard narrative techniques.

To begin with, Raging Bull seems to have been made out of an impatience with all the usual trappings of cinema, with plot, psychology and an explanatory approach to character. A number of early scenes, conversations between Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro) and his brother Joey (Joe Pesci) about Jake's career, his intransigence, his violent behaviour outside the ring, even about a neighbourhood girl, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), sitting beside a pool, have an intensity but a woolliness, an emotional fervour but a roundabout, elliptical, barely heard inconsequentiality that seem to frustrate any narrative function. They are also...