Powell noted that, not only were the bright red boxing gloves De Niro wore distracting, they were not period-accurate. Scorsese happened upon the idea to shoot in black and white when he reviewed some initial test footage of De Niro in the ring with his friend and mentor, the legendary Michael Powell, and found that it didn't look right. Every choice, from the decision to shoot in black and white to Robert De Niro's refusal to fake the vast body changes middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta underwent during his life, is the right one, one that finds verisimilitude in pure cinematic construction as only Scorsese can manage. I have seen it derided as an inaccurate depiction of boxing technique by those who emphatically miss the point, but otherwise Scorsese's biopic has been rightly accepted as a modern classic, and perhaps the last creative gasp of New Hollywood as Heaven's Gate et al. Raging Bull is one of the great character studies of the cinema.
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