My Victims, My Melancholia: Raging Bull and Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and The Beautiful

Abstract

Despite the many transtextual moments in Raging Bull, its engagement with Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) has largely escaped critical attention. When Scorsese put together his meditation on American cinema, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), he chose to begin the four-hour documentary with a clip from Minnelli's film about a megalomaniac Hollywood producer and three victims of his boundless ego. Many years before this, in New York, New York (1977), Scorsese shot a violent car scene in homage to one of the emotional high-points of The Bad and the Beautiful. In Raging Bull itself, allusions to Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Tw..