‘I was bleeding internally all over and I didn’t know it. My eyes were bleeding, my hands, everything except my brain and my liver… then I realised I was LaMotta, I’d make the movie about me.’ Six years and six films after Mean Streets propelled him into the maelstrom of Hollywood success – and a near-fatal drug problem – Martin Scorsese made what he believed could be his last movie. Its subject: the Bronx Bull, Jake La Motta, a graceless but indomitable boxer who never quits beating himself up. Punishing, painful and pitiless, with the ultimate Method performance from Robert De Niro at its core, it’s in many ways the culmination of the American psycho-realist tradition, but this is realism pushing through towards spiritual redemption by way of Scorsese’s heightened subjective style.