Raging Bull 25th Anniversary Special Edition is What Fans Have Waited for

At the time that Martin Scorsese was directing Raging Bull, he felt like it would be the last movie that Hollywood was going to "let" him direct. Coming off the critically and commercially ravaged big budget homage/critique of musicals, New York, New York, he entered into the making of this boxing film a sense of abandon and freedom that only comes from knowing you have nothing to lose.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of this landmark film, one voted the best film of the '80s in a poll taken of critics at the end of that decade. For a long time the only DVD version was a single disc release with no special features. This year that all changed, and in a big way.

The 25th Anniversary Special Edition two disc set of Raging Bull is the one all fans of this film have been waiting for. Packaged in a gorgeous insert box featuring black and white stills from the movie, the DVD is presented by MGM as part of The Martin Scorsese Film Collection. In addition to a pristine remastering of the beautiful silvery black and white print of the greatest sports film of all time and one of the greatest movies of all time period, at last fans are treated to a commentary from the master himself, Martin Scorsese.

What makes this even better is that commentary also includes Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese's editor on this and many of him films. If you've never seen this movie, you should know that Schoonmaker was an Oscar for it and deservedly so. As did Robert DeNiro. The really amazing thing, of course; an almost legendary thing, in fact, is that neither Scorsese nor the film itself won Academy Awards. Well, I guess maybe Ordinary People is a better movie and Robert Redford is a better director.

Oooooh, that's good sarcasm!

Anyway, it's a wonderful treat to have Scorsese have his editor along for the commentary since so much of the power of this movie comes from its editing, especially its sound editing. The fight scenes are, of course, the epitome of this, but remember the fight scenes in this boxing movie take up less than 15 minutes of screen time out of a total running time over two hours.