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PARTISAN REVIEW
he beats his head and fists against the wall, crying, "Why, why, why?"
and "So stupid." Scorsese is summing up the pathetically damaged life of a
man who has squandered his strength. The final scene is a haJJ of mirrors
in which La Motta, now a cabaret entertainer, rehearses Marlon Brando's
" I coulda been a contender" speech to himself in the mirror of his dress–
ing room just before a performance. La Motta, shadowboxing, is finally at
ease with himself, emotionaJJy flat, all passion spent. But how far he has
come from the lyrical shadowboxing of the opening shot! There we saw
the young boxer in the smoky ring, dancing around in muted color, ec–
staticaJJy alone but for the occasional flashbulb and the swelling music of
Mascagni on the soundtrack.
Boxing films reached their peak during the
film noir
period, when
they always had a whiff of Dostoevsky about them. The gyms and bars
where boxers hung out, the sleazy arenas where they fought, the shady
characters and fleabag hotels, even the fighting itself, had les to do with
sports than with the dark night of the soul. Though their apparent subject
is physical punishment - Joyce Carol Oates notes that "contrary to
stereotyped notions, boxing is primarily about being, not giving, hurt" -
boxing films have always been about the ordeals and humiliations that
lead to spiritual redemption.
In Robert Wise's
noir
classic
The Set- Up
(1949), made the same year
La Motta won the title, Robert Ryan plays a broken-down thirty-five
year-old fighter who is so demoralized that his manager takes a paltry
bribe to throw a fight and doesn't even tell him - he's so sure his man
will lose anyway. When Ryan, in an unexpected surge of self-respect,
fights to win and actually does win, his manager and trainer take a pow–
der, and he gets his hand destroyed by the enraged fixer. His harried wife,
who can't stand the punishment he's taken all along and has tried to leave
him, instead gets him back, damaged but still alive, free at last from the
ordeal in the arena. When she cradles him in her arms, he tells her, "I
won tonight." "We both won tonight," she says, reclaiming him before
body and soul have been completely destroyed.
The spiritual dimension of boxing movies shows not so much in the
seedy life, the shady moral atmosphere, but in the physical trials them–
selves - the masochism, the gladiatorial spectacle, the intimacy and expo–
sure - filmed at such close quarters that we ourselves are in the ring. In
The Set-Up
these two-bit fighters are society's outcasts, the insulted and
the injured, bashing each others' heads while a bloodthirsty crowd shrieks
for more. Knocked around by petty gangsters, crooked retainers, and
worthless opponents, an aging fighter gains his life by losing it, salvaging a
shred of honor as he leaves the ring forever.
For Scorsese, La Motta's trials take another form, with no facile tri-
