Though we've left out some sentimental choices — cry us a river over "Brian's Song" another time — we're confident that you'll discover some new favorites
In her previous feature-length documentary, Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl made Adolf Hitler a movie star. In Olympia, her two-part record of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games — titled Festival of the Nations and Festival of Beauty — the German director laid the same blessing on the American black athlete Jesse Owens. For Riefenstahl, perhaps the finest female director in cinema history and certainly its most notorious, really had no politics. Rather, she was a prime rhapsodizer of both geometric spectacle (Nazi architect Albert Speer was Triumph‘s production designer) and the glorious human body in action (in Olympia). An athlete from her youth, Riefenstahl began her career as a dancer in Ways to Strength and Beauty, then became the silent star of Germany’s mountain films, her svelte, handsome form clambering over precipices and skiing down treacherous slopes. She admired athletic prowess from the inside and knew, instinctively, how to photograph it.
All televised sport, not to mention nearly every sports film, is indebted to Olympia. It pioneered such techniques as placing cameras in balloons, in ditches, on a track racing with the sprinters, underwater as divers slice into the Olympic pool. More important, the film personalized the athletes: the glint of confidence on Owens’ face, the exhaustion of the marathoners as each painful step leads toward the stadium. In a way, Riefenstahl’s achievements here are more impressive than those of fiction-film directors. They had a script; she had only miles of footage (250 miles) to be scanned and scissored into art. She did it, controlling every frame of both films herself.
Olympia was a worldwide hit, but Riefenstahl’s reputation as “Hitler’s Pin-Up Girl” (the title of Budd Schulberg’s 1946 article on her for the Saturday Evening Post) stymied her film career. In the second half of her long life she took photographs of Nuba tribesmen and, in her 90s, still astonishingly spry and curious, worked on a scuba-diving documentary — starring, of course, herself. Underwater Impressions was released in 2002 on her 100th birthday; she died a year later.
Jake LaMotta, the Bronx Bull, butted his way to the middleweight championship of boxing in 1949. In his autobiography, Raging Bull, he says he “fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times I got diabetes.” He played rope-a-dope with the Mob. He ballooned from 160 lb. (73 kg) to 210 lb. (95 kg). Within a year of retiring, he was convicted on a morals charge involving a 14-year-old prostitute and made a comeback of sorts as a road-show Rocky Graziano. He finally stumbled into glory when Martin Scorsese made a film of LaMotta’s life — in black-and-white, like Body and Soul and Champion — with Robert De Niro, at the peak of his feral majesty, in the title role. Roger Ebert is not the only critic who thinks Raging Bull is the best film of the 1980s.
LaMotta was an animal — a bull in the ring and a pig outside — and Scorsese is true to both Jakes. The boxing sequences are as violent, controlled, repulsive and exhilarating as anything in the genre. Scorsese layers the sound track with grunts and screams, animal noises that seem to emanate from hell’s zoo. Michael Chapman’s camera muscles into the action, peering from above, from below, from the combatant’s point of view, panning 360 degrees as a doomed fighter spins toward the canvas. Smoke, sweat, flesh and blood become Jackson Pollock abstractions as they pound home the essential bloodlust of those sweet sciences, prizefighting and moviemaking. The ring is where Scorsese’s art is most alive, because it is where Jake lives, where he can do battle on equal terms, playing by hard men’s rules. It is where Jake’s life finally achieves meaning when he wins the title — and where, in his 1951 match with the stylish Robinson, Jake loses everything but the pride that propels him over to the new champ’s corner to boast, “You never knocked me down, Ray!”
Jake also fights with his brother Joey (Joe Pesci) and his blond, teen-goddess wife Vickie (Cathy Moriarty); anyone who thinks these Othello-Iago-Desdemona conflicts are the heart of the movie is welcome to fill out this paragraph. We’d say they are brutal but repetitious, without the build and threat of the fight sequences. But in or out of the ring, De Niro is monstrously convincing. He trained as a boxer for months until LaMotta, who coached him, believed the actor could be a contender; he gained 50 lb. (22 kg) in two months to play the aging Jake. As Jake in 1941 or Jake in 1964, as comer or loser, as raging-bull boxer or battering-ram husband, whether shouting obscenity or whispering apology, De Niro is always absorbing and credible. His performance is true to LaMotta’s life as the growing, then raging, then gelded bull.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
