Peter Savage Movies
- 1970
The New Life Style is the 1970 U.S. re-edited and re-shot version of the 1967 West German film Heisser Sand Auf Sylt, with new footage directed by Peter Savage and featuring Jake LaMotta and Rocky Graziano. Walter Bergman (Horst Tappert) is a married man who has an affair with a swinging, sex-starved blonde at a North Sea resort. The middle aged Walter ogles the nude sunbathers and eventually leaves the woman after finding her in bed with another man. The technical quality of the U.S.-lensed scenes are somewhat better than that of the original, creating the problem of mismatched footage. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Horst Tappert
- 1970
This 1968 X rated film finds Charles Delmont (Peter Savage) as the American deserter rendered impotent by his wartime experience living in Naples. Joe (Jake La Motta) introduces him to some underworld figures who force him into having sex with Annette (Teresa Pelati). Plenty of sex and violence this uneven and technically poor film. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Peter Savage, Jake LaMotta, (more)
The excessive violence in this action thriller makes New York City look like the site of a civil war -- or rather, a nauseatingly uncivil war fought between factory workers allied with neighborhood citizens against their enemies: drug pushers and other low-lifes. At first the worker Eddie Merino (Robert Forster) refuses to join a vigilante movement, but when his wife is stabbed and his son killed by a Puerto Rican gang, Eddie eventually opts for his own right to kill. His decision is not allowed to come quickly, he is made to agonize a bit longer. When the gang leader (singer Willie Colón) who killed Eddie's son is caught and brought up for trial, he gets off with a suspended sentence because of a corrupt defense lawyer and an inept judge. Eddie attacks the judge in court and is sent to jail for contempt. When he gets out of jail, he becomes a vigilante, out to kill the guilty or those he sees as protecting the guilty in the death of his son. From then on, a non-stop bloodbath takes over as the star of the film. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Robert Forster, Fred Williamson, (more)
Martin Scorsese's brutal character study incisively portrays the true rise and fall and redemption of middleweight boxer Jake La Motta, a violent man in and out of the ring who thrives on his ability (and desire) to take a beating. Opening with the spectacle of the over-the-hill La Motta (Robert De Niro) practicing his 1960s night-club act, the film flashes back to 1940s New York, when Jake's career is on the rise. Despite pressure from the local mobsters, Jake trusts his brother Joey (Joe Pesci) to help him make it to a title bout against Sugar Ray Robinson the honest way; the Mob, however, will not cave in. Jake gets the title bout, and blonde teenage second wife Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), but success does nothing to exorcise his demons, even as he channels his rage into boxing. Alienating Vickie and Joey, and disastrously gaining weight, Jake has destroyed his personal and professional lives by the 1950s. After he hits bottom, however, Jake emerges with a gleam of self-awareness, as he sits rehearsing Marlon Brando's On the Waterfront speech in his dressing room mirror: "I coulda been a contender, I coulda been somebody." Working with a script adapted by Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader from La Motta's memoirs, Scorsese and De Niro sought to make an uncompromising portrait of an unlikable man and his ruthless profession. Eschewing uplifting Rocky-like boxing movie conventions, their Jake is relentlessly cruel and self-destructive; the only peace he can make is with himself. Michael Chapman's stark black-and-white photography creates a documentary/tabloid realism; the production famously shut down so that De Niro could gain 50-plus pounds. Raging Bull opened in late 1980 to raves for its artistry and revulsion for its protagonist; despite eight Oscar nominations, it underperformed at the box office, as audiences increasingly turned away from "difficult" films in the late '70s and early '80s. The Academy concurred, passing over Scorsese's work for Best Director and Picture in favor of Robert Redford and Ordinary People, although De Niro won a much-deserved Oscar, as did the film's editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. Oscar or no Oscar, Raging Bull has often been cited as the best American film of the 1980s. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty, (more)
"All the animals come out at night" -- and one of them is a cabby about to snap. In Martin Scorsese's classic 1970s drama, insomniac ex-Marine Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) works the nightshift, driving his cab throughout decaying mid-'70s New York City, wishing for a "real rain" to wash the "scum" off the neon-lit streets. Chronically alone, Travis cannot connect with anyone, not even with such other cabbies as blowhard Wizard (Peter Boyle). He becomes infatuated with vapid blonde presidential campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who agrees to a date and then spurns Travis when he cluelessly takes her to a porno movie. After an encounter with a malevolent fare (played by Scorsese), the increasingly paranoid Travis begins to condition (and arm) himself for his imagined destiny, a mission that mutates from assassinating Betsy's candidate, Charles Palatine (Leonard Harris), to violently "saving" teen hooker Iris (Jodie Foster) from her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel). Travis' bloodbath turns him into a media hero; but has it truly calmed his mind?
Written by Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver is an homage to and reworking of cinematic influences, a study of individual psychosis, and an acute diagnosis of the latently violent, media-fixated Vietnam era. Scorsese and Schrader structure Travis' mission to save Iris as a film noir version of John Ford's late Western The Searchers (1956), aligning Travis with a mythology of American heroism while exposing that myth's obsessively violent underpinnings. Yet Travis' military record and assassination attempt, as well as Palatine's political platitudes, also ground Taxi Driver in its historical moment of American in the 1970s. Employing such techniques as Godardian jump cuts and ellipses, expressive camera moves and angles, and garish colors, all punctuated by Bernard Herrmann's eerie final score (finished the day he died), Scorsese presents a Manhattan skewed through Travis' point-of-view, where De Niro's now-famous "You talkin' to me" improv becomes one more sign of Travis' madness. Shot during a New York summer heat wave and garbage strike, Taxi Driver got into trouble with the MPAA for its violence. Scorsese desaturated the color in the final shoot-out and got an R, and Taxi Driver surprised its unenthusiastic studio by becoming a box-office hit. Released in the Bicentennial year, after Vietnam, Watergate, and attention-getting attempts on President Ford's life, Taxi Driver's intense portrait of a man and a society unhinged spoke resonantly to the mid-'70s audience -- too resonantly in the case of attempted Reagan assassin and Foster fan John W. Hinckley. Taxi Driver went on to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but it lost the Best Picture Oscar to the more comforting Rocky. Anchored by De Niro's disturbing embodiment of "God's lonely man," Taxi Driver remains a striking milestone of both Scorsese's career and 1970s Hollywood. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
Written by Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver is an homage to and reworking of cinematic influences, a study of individual psychosis, and an acute diagnosis of the latently violent, media-fixated Vietnam era. Scorsese and Schrader structure Travis' mission to save Iris as a film noir version of John Ford's late Western The Searchers (1956), aligning Travis with a mythology of American heroism while exposing that myth's obsessively violent underpinnings. Yet Travis' military record and assassination attempt, as well as Palatine's political platitudes, also ground Taxi Driver in its historical moment of American in the 1970s. Employing such techniques as Godardian jump cuts and ellipses, expressive camera moves and angles, and garish colors, all punctuated by Bernard Herrmann's eerie final score (finished the day he died), Scorsese presents a Manhattan skewed through Travis' point-of-view, where De Niro's now-famous "You talkin' to me" improv becomes one more sign of Travis' madness. Shot during a New York summer heat wave and garbage strike, Taxi Driver got into trouble with the MPAA for its violence. Scorsese desaturated the color in the final shoot-out and got an R, and Taxi Driver surprised its unenthusiastic studio by becoming a box-office hit. Released in the Bicentennial year, after Vietnam, Watergate, and attention-getting attempts on President Ford's life, Taxi Driver's intense portrait of a man and a society unhinged spoke resonantly to the mid-'70s audience -- too resonantly in the case of attempted Reagan assassin and Foster fan John W. Hinckley. Taxi Driver went on to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but it lost the Best Picture Oscar to the more comforting Rocky. Anchored by De Niro's disturbing embodiment of "God's lonely man," Taxi Driver remains a striking milestone of both Scorsese's career and 1970s Hollywood. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd, (more)
- 1974
- R
This graphically violent crime drama follows the relatively brief career of the notorious racketeer Crazy Joe Gallo, who formed an alliance with all of New York City's African-American gangs while serving time in Attica. Once he got out, he used that alliance to try and take over the Mafia, an act that resulted in his brutal murder in a restaurant in Little Italy, 1972. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
Martin Scorsese combined the splashy atmosphere of the old studio musical with an unromanticized marriage story in his valentine to Hollywood and the Big Band era. On V-J Day 1945, newly minted civilian saxophonist Jimmy Doyle (Robert De Niro) meets USO singer Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli) at a dance, but she rebuffs every advance that he makes. A day and a hotel lobby meeting later, Jimmy finally wins Francine over after she uses her pop instincts to save his too-jazzy audition at a nightclub. When she goes on tour with Frankie Harte (Georgie Auld) and his Orchestra, Jimmy tracks her down, taking a job with the orchestra to be with her. Together on stage, they make beautiful music; off stage they marry, but the struggle between two artists begins to take its toll. Unable to understand that Francine's needs and talents are just as important as his, and unwilling to compromise his music for security, Jimmy abandons Francine after their baby is born. Separately, the two succeed even more, as Francine becomes a music and movie star, while Jimmy has a top hit and opens a jazz club. When they are reunited several years later, the pair must decide if their relationship is worth another try. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Liza Minnelli, Robert De Niro, (more)
