Not A Boxing Film

The fights occupy perhaps ten minutes and are shot nothing like sport. Scorsese put the camera inside the ring, changed the size of the ring between bouts, fired flashbulbs, pumped in smoke and sprayed blood onto the ropes, because the point was never the boxing. The subject is jealousy as a permanent condition: a man who cannot believe anything good belongs to him and destroys it to prove himself right. Everything else is ordinary life in the Bronx, filmed in flat black and white, in kitchens and living rooms where the real damage happens. Scorsese made it while recovering from a collapse and has said he approached it as a film he might not survive to follow up.