Sniggerlings: "Raging Bull"

Sniggerlings: Raging Bull

      If you all are interested in Classic movies, classic TV, and boxing, I have a treat for you. I just saw Jake LaMotta -- “The Raging Bull” -- on an episode of Car 54, Where are You” on MeTV. He played Bugsy, a number two thug in a “gang that couldn’t shoot straight” comic episode entitled “I‘ve Been Here Before“(airing originally January 10, 1963.)

      For those of you currently desiring a quickie education in the topics mentioned above, I’ll fill you in. First, Jake La Motta was World Middleweight Champion from 1949 to 1951. His life was portrayed in the movie Raging Bull by Robert De Niro, who won the Academy Award for Best Actor as La Motta in 1980. Along with a career in boxing, he also has survived seven wives(Wikipedia 2/15/14) and admitting that he threw a fight for the Mafia in 1947.

      Car 54, Where are You?  was a sitcom on ABC from 1961 to 1963. It was about a fictional police department in the Bronx, NY. It was filmed at the Old Biograph studios in the Bronx, which was built in 1912 and was patterned on the Edison studios’ “Black Maria” in West Orange, New Jersey(it was to avoid patent infringement lawsuits from Edison that DeMille, Goldwyn, and others came west to a place previously unheard of, named Hollywood.) D.W. Griffiths filmed at Biograph with actors like Mary Pickford and the Barrymores and directors like Mack Sennett -- whose “Keystone Cops” were undoubtedly a model for Car 54. Note: When you think of Sennett, think of his protégé, a poorly dressed fellow named Charlie Chaplin(see United Artists.)(Wikipedia 2/15/14.)

      I also saw an episode of The Untouchables on TV from about 1959, in which Claire Trevor -- one of my favorite actresses -- portrayed Ma Barker, in a frightening tour de force. Ma Barker was the mother of a gang of bank robbers and murderers in the Thirties, who violently and successfully plied their craft until Ma sent her oldest boy in Chicago a cake for his birthday and Eliot Ness tracked it back to her hideout in Florida. Then Tommy guns and hand grenades and waves of Federal agents.

      Claire Trevor was John Wayne’s love interest in the classic John Ford western Stagecoach in 1939 and an aging gangster’s moll to Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, opposite the married Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. She won the Academy Award in about 1947 for Best Supporting Actress in that movie. She was a successful radio personality, an Emmy winner, and one of the most beautiful women I ever saw. And smart as Hell.(Wikipedia 2/15/14.)
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