The young fighter is tense, moody, seeming to vibrate like a plucked guitar string: he erupts with anger, which then morphs either into sullen resentment or giggling mockery, as if it is his victims who are behaving absurdly. Young La Motta in the ring and old La Motta on the skids, pensively going through his monologue routine in the dressing room before his night-club act: they are the same person, yet different, and of course this was partly because of the weight De Niro famously piled on for the part. I can't think of any other film which so persuasively shows a character getting older. The punch-ups that break out in the crowd at that first fight … the screaming woman trampled underfoot, glimpsed and then instantly forgotten about … it still scares me. The fight sequences themselves, with the camera swirling and swooping around the ring, and the soundtrack sometimes gulping out into silence and sometimes moaning with weird half-heard animal noises, are unforgettable: an inspired reportage recreation in the manner of a Life magazine shoot, which also looks like expressionist newsreel footage of a bad dream. The result is operatic and mad and compelling. It's all captured in dreamlike, pin-sharp monochrome cinematography, stark images reproduced like a Weegee crime scene.

The effect is to combine stunning scenes of brutality and self-destruction with a lethal, even outrageous sentimentalism and self-pity. The film actually suppresses many of the nastier aspects of La Motta's life and essentially takes him at his own lenient estimation of himself, emphasising what was allegedly his initial, pig-headed resistance to gangsters' parasitic involvement in his career. In the ring, he was a graceless brawler, outside it a repugnant bully and wife-beater who was in thrall to the mob.

It starred Robert De Niro, electrifyingly and horribly charismatic in the role of 1940s middleweight boxing champ Jake La Motta. The film was Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull – or, to give it the title that appeared on screen, RagingBull it was run together, like GoodFellas. When it was all over, I felt exhausted, but also possessed of a strange need to scream, or laugh, or run all the way home, or pick up parked cars and flip them over. When I first saw it, I was 19 years old it was at the Screen on the Hill cinema in North London, now renamed the Everyman Belsize Park.

Robert de niro boxing