BOXING ENJOYS a special prestige in this country, equalled in degree only, perhaps, by money. There is nothing more intimately involved with the American way of being a man than the ability to knock someone down with a fist, and the cachet of a prizefighter exceeds that of, say, a football or hockey player, or a soldier, or certainly a novelist. In a century of institutional mayhem on such a scale that not only motives but actual numbers are impossible to comprehend, the boxer is our Deerslayer, the last surviving synthesis of American violence and American aloneness. And whether the boxer deserves to be a hero, still there is no denying him his status in merely practical terms in a country where violence is "as American as apple pie."

So it was probably inevitable that Martin Scorsese, one of a crowd of fine young American directors and maybe the best of them, would end up making a movie about boxing. All of the American rituals of machismo apply a fortiori to Italian-Americans; the pathetic pulp idiocy of Rocky virtually created Raging Bull. It is the story of Jake LaMotta only as much as Taxi Driver was the story of Travis Bickle, for Scorsese's new film has the same epic thrust of the earlier one. But where Taxi Driver was about America after Vietnam, Raging Bull is really about Martin Scorsese; only this essential decadence keeps it from greatness.

Jake LaMotta was once middleweight champion of the world, at a time when that title meant even more than it usually does. He could take a punch better than anyone--partly because punching his head was like punching a provolone--and he had a left hook that could leave even Sugar Ray Robinson, maybe the best pound-for-pound fighter of all time, quivering on the mat like a dead leaf too long on the tree. He came out of the tough neighborhoods of the Bronx, and when it was over, he had an old middleweight title, a divorce, a bad morals rap in Miami, a gut like an ocean basin, and a comedy routine that got him places like the Jerry Lewis Telethon. He used to hang around bars like P.J. Clarke's in New York, telling people his story, telling them how they would make a book and a movie out of it. And they did. Jake LaMotta was the kind of guy who always seemed to get what he wanted, mostly because he went after it like a gorilla with a hard-on.

SOMEWHERE IN THE FILMING of Raging Bull, though, Jake LaMotta disappeared--literally, he was kicked off the set, but in another sense, the real LaMotta didn't fit Scorsese's purpose. Raging Bull is about a parochial way of life, the mores of Italians moving up in the Bronx after the war. As a period piece, the movie is astonishing in its particularity--every detail is right, from the shirt collars to the old-style Kleenex box in LaMotta's bathroom; from the night at the Copacabana (where all the Italians of that era used to go for their big night out) to the Souvenir Special Club (there are still dozens of them all over the Bronx--they all have Venetian blinds in the front plate-glass window and they're all fronts for bookie joints); from men eating dinner in their underwear to the opera on the radio.

But more than the close attention to visual detail, what distinguishes Raging Bull is the way Scorsese has captured the flatness and banal perversity of these lives. Much of the credit for this belongs to Paul Schrader, who scripted Taxi Driver and was called in to assist Mardik Martin with Raging. Schrader writes highly stylized dialogue, the way short story writers write it. Often there's a total lack of communication:

The only way you're not gonna get a shot is if Tommy dies.

Is Tommy sick?

No, but I mean the only way you're not gonna get a shot is if Tommy dies.

What do you mean, if Tommy dies? Is Tommy gonna die?

No, no, but the only way you're not gonna get a shot is if Tommy dies.

Why do you say that? 'If Tommy dies.'

And the lack of expression, in Raging, becomes violent:

Joey, did you fuck my wife?

What?

I'm askin' you, did you fuck Vicki?