Fleapit revisited:Raging Bull.

New York City, 1964, and a theatre somewhere is hosting One Evening With Jake LaMotta. The former champ chomps on cigars and rehearses his spiel in his dressing room. Cut to the Cleveland Arena twenty-three years earlier where we see a younger LaMotta (Robert De Niro) fighting, and losing to - highly controversially, Jimmy Reeves (Floyd Anderson).

It's his first ever loss and he doesn't like it much at all. In Martin Scorsese's celebrated 1980 film Raging Bull (shown recently on BBC2/iPlayer, screenplay c/o Paul Schrader & Mardik Martin and based on LaMotta's own book - LaMotta even acted as consultant on the film) we're told the story of Jake LaMotta the boxer - and the story of Jake LaMotta the man.

It's sometimes hard to tell where one version of LaMotta ends and the other begins. Following his defeat to Reeves, LaMotta takes it out on his (first) wife Irma (Lori Anne Flax). Verbally. At least at first. His brother and manager, Joey (Joe Pesci) tries to control him but he doesn't necessarily have a lot of success with that.

LaMotta believes he's the best but he doesn't believe he'll be given a chance to prove it against those currently recognised as the best. Like, for example, Joe Louis (Coley Wallace). Joey tries to point out to Jake that Louis, the Brown Bomber, is a heavyweight and that Jake, the Bronx Bull - or Raging Bull of the film's title, is a middleweight.

LaMotta meets fifteen year old Vickie (Cathy Moriarty) in their Bronx neighbourhood. He falls for her. She falls for him. They go for a spin in his car. They have a game of crazy golf. They get married. They have kids. He gets jealous, he gets angry, and then he gets violent.

His violence outside the ring causes problems in his life. His violence in the ring not so much. He fights Sugar Ray Robinson (Johnny Barnes) several times. Sometimes winning, sometimes losing. Sometimes ending up caked in blood but never going to the canvas. When Robinson wins a fight, we see Joey smash a chair up in anger. Jake LaMotta is not the only one of the brothers to have anger management issues and he's not the only one in this film who fails to treat women respectfully. I couldn't help thinking that Pesci's Joey was a prototype for his Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas (also for Scorsese) a decade later.

Shot, mostly, in black and white, it's a film set in a world of beer, cigarettes, smart suits, jazz, card games, espresso, a hell of a lot of swearing and, for some reason, a lot of sailors. There's a clever nod to Elia Kazan's On The Waterfront, a very of its time advert for Pabst Blue Ribbon (later to become the hipster lager of choice in America), and rather lovely use is made of Pietro Mascagni's 1890 Cavalleria rusticana. There's also a scene where LaMotta pours ice water over his genitals to dampen his ardour so he doesn't get carried away before a big fight.

The boxing scenes are intense (you can almost feel the punches, get drenched by the sweat that flies off the boxer's skins) but the family scenes are no less poweful. LaMotta wins fights, he loses fights, he even throws a fight - he does operate within a world of wise guys like Tommy Como (Nicholas Colasanto) and Salvy Batts (Frank Vincent) after all - and gets suspended. He cries, he seethes with rage, and he eventually gets his shot at a title fight against the French boxer Marcel Cerdan (Louis Raftis).

The film may be forty-five years old but how that goes, and what that does to LaMotta as both a boxer and a man, I'm not going to say because I'm not in the business of spoilers. Raging Bull is a classic piece of cinema, a historical item if you will, but like a boxer you need to be patient to get the best results.

It's not really until the second hour that things start to really open up and then we, the audience, realise the film is less about LaMotta the (flawed but great) boxer but about LaMotta, a flawed man. A very flawed man. But one brilliantly portrayed by Robert De Niro. It's a real punch in the guts.