For ‘Raging Bull,’ a Well-Deserved Comeback

Television, and after it the videocasette recorder and player, have done miraculous things for the theatrical motion picture. They have pried open the doors to its long-closed vaults. They’ve created an easy-access library stocked with all the surviving classics and the endless creaky clinkers as well. Every viewer can be as much of a film historian as he or she cares to be.

But the eternal verity is still that there is no substitute for watching a film--any film--in the comforting, anonymous darkness of a theater. It’s not only screen size and shape; it’s equally the mesmerizing power of the images undistracted by household surroundings and ordinary realities.

The charge that an intimate film is only television fare is bloody nonsense. A couple in a rowboat in Central Park is one experience on the big screen, another in the living room with the telephone ringing.

Ten years after its initial release, Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” his often brutal, uncompromising and engrossing portrait of the boxer Jake La Motta, has been experimentally revived, initially in cinemas in just two cities, New York and Los Angeles, to see whether in fact there is a sufficiency of viewers eager to see the unshrunk version.

It was made, and remains, in glorious, frequently newsreel-authentic black and white (cinematography by Michael Chapman), one of the few major films of recent years to defy the dominance of color production. A video version has been on the market for several years and it was shown on network television, with its notorious language laundered away. It hasn’t been unseeable, nor is it, like David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” a restoration of a butchered original. It is simply Scorsese’s film, visible again. Big.

And, the film’s co-producer Irwin Winkler said late last week, the business in the first two bookings has been so encouraging that the “Raging Bull” rerelease will shortly be extended to Chicago, Washington, Seattle and ultimately to perhaps 20 or 30 additional cities.

“I went to see it again for the first time since Bob (Chartoff) and I produced it,” Winkler said. “There were a lot of young people there who had to be seeing it for the first time ever, and liking it. There was applause at the end, which you don’t usually find when a movie has been playing for a while.”

Winkler and his longtime partner Chartoff went their separate producing ways seven years ago. They still produce jointly only the “Rocky” series, which established their fortunes and made their solo work possible. “Rocky V,” written as always by Sylvester Stallone and directed again by John Avildsen, who did the historic “Rocky I,” goes into production this week in Philadelphia.

On his own, Winkler has been working again with Scorsese, producing “Good Fellows,” a Mafia story involving two other “Raging Bull” alumni, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, and taking Scorsese back into the contemporary Italian-American community of Manhattan where he made his first strong impact with “Who’s That Knocking on My Door” and “Mean Streets.” Now in rough-cut stage, it will probably be released in late summer.

Winkler has most recently produced “Music Box,” directed by Costa-Gavras and starring Jessica Lange as a Chicago lawyer defending her father on charges that he was a war criminal in World War II.

“Costa,” Winkler says, “told me about being a small boy in Athens in 1940 and watching movies they would project on big sheets. I don’t know where they got the prints, but they had some of an Esther Williams movie and Costa said that at that moment it was the most political film ever made--those images of a glamorous America seen amid the poverty of Athens.”

Although the major studios are said to be insufficiently adventurous these days, Winkler says that when United Artists, embroiled in corporate uncertainties, had “Music Box” into turnaround, three studios bid on it, despite its difficult theme.

What remains the film that he and Chartoff had the most difficulty getting financing for was “Rocky.” “UA had given us $9 million for ‘New York, New York,’ which was an enormous sum then. They were convinced it would be a major hit; so were we. But they said nobody wanted boxing pictures, especially foreign, especially with women, and especially with an actor nobody ever heard of. They were convinced it would be a disaster.” But history rewrites the most persuasive scripts. “New York, New York” was not a hit; “Rocky” became “Rocky.”

Winkler has now written a script, “Fear No Evil,” which he will direct, set in the days of the Hollywood blacklist and covering a few months in the life of a director who is under pressure to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, repudiate his past and betray his friends. The original script was written by Abraham Polonsky, himself a blacklist victim. It focused on a director who, like Joseph Losey, was forced to live and work in European exile. Winkler says he prefered to base the story in Hollywood; the parting has not been without bitterness.

The film, as Winkler sees it, “is about a man being tested, like Job.”

A pleasing irony about the renewed success of “Raging Bull,” which has now appeared on several lists of the best films of the ‘80s, is that in last stages of post-production it did not seem to be coming together.

“Every week, it seemed,” Winkler says, “I would fly back to New York to look at Marty’s latest cut. The picture just wasn’t working. Then Marty divided the last scene in two and made it the bookends for the whole film.” The older, fatter La Motta, in a tuxedo, waits in a nightclub dressing room to go on, while a whole life goes through him.

It worked.