Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-sxzjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T01:47:51.671Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2009

Mark Nicholls
Affiliation:
Lecturer in Cinema Studies in the School of Art History, Cinema, Classical Studies and Archaeology, University of Melbourne, Australia
Kevin J. Hayes
Affiliation:
University of Central Oklahoma
Get access

Summary

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 Twice (1946), Kirk Douglas in The Champion (1949), and Minnelli as director of The Father of the Bride (1950) inevitably lead us to consider The Bad and the Beautiful – the tale of angst-ridden Hollywood masculinity in which the three stars combine forces. Furthermore, in those key moments of desire in Raging Bull, when Vickie dangles her legs in the pool and later over the foot of the bed, Scorsese makes reference to the first thing we see of Lana Turner in The Bad and the Beautiful when her legs (also her entrée in The Postman Always Rings Twice) hang down from a hole in the roof of an abandoned Hollywood mansion.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×