Pods Against Tomorrow: Reinvestigating Film Noir
Jul 21, 2026 · 1 hr 42 min · 12 segments
Pods Against Tomorrow reinvestigates the noir genre one film at a time. Join our hosts, Hugh Manon and Abe Doubleday-Bush, along with a rotating guest — our "Ace in the Hole" — as they delve into an…
Hugh ManonHost
Joseph ReynosoGuestAbe Doubleday-BushHost
that's never my experience i guess i guess boxing would also put you there too right uppercut you're out right All right, the first item on our agenda, it's Abe with a period summary of the film that we call The Throwback Rundown.
There's scarcely a minute in Raging Bull that isn't edged by intimations of mortality.
Jake LaMotta, played by Robert De Niro, is a titanic character, a furious original, a mean, inarticulate, Bronx-bred fighter.
He is propelled not by his milieu, his unruly id, or by his guilts, but by something far more mysterious.
Raging Bull covers Mr. LaMotta's life from his earliest attempts to get a title fight in 1941, through the period when he was barred from the ring for throwing a fight on behalf of the mob, his winning of the crown, his final defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson, and finally by his dwindling career as a nightclub personality.
Though it's a movie full of anger and nonstop physical violence, the effect of Raging Bull is lyrical.
To witness Jake's fury is to swing through the upper atmosphere of the emotions.
Giving him superb support are two new performers, Joe Pesci, who plays Jake's younger brother Joey, and Kathy Moriarty, a beautiful young blonde woman who's never acted before.
Miss Moriarty comes across with the assurance of an actor's studio veteran as Jake's second wife, Vicky.
Toward the end, Jake, now over the hill, gone to flab and possibly deranged, is thrown into a Miami jail on a morals charge.
Full of self-pity and unfocused rage, he beats his head against the wall of his cell and whimpers, I'm not an animal.
Though there's not one sequence in the film when he hasn't behaved like an animal, Jake, like all the rest of us, is the kind of animal who can ask a question.
At the heart of the film, there's the mystery of Jake himself, but that is what separates Raging Bull from all other fight movies.
that's never my experience i guess i guess boxing would also put you there too right uppercut you're out right All right, the first item on our agenda, it's Abe with a period summary of the film that we call The Throwback Rundown.
There's scarcely a minute in Raging Bull that isn't edged by intimations of mortality.
Jake LaMotta, played by Robert De Niro, is a titanic character, a furious original, a mean, inarticulate, Bronx-bred fighter.
He is propelled not by his milieu, his unruly id, or by his guilts, but by something far more mysterious.
Raging Bull covers Mr. LaMotta's life from his earliest attempts to get a title fight in 1941, through the period when he was barred from the ring for throwing a fight on behalf of the mob, his winning of the crown, his final defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson, and finally by his dwindling career as a nightclub personality.
Though it's a movie full of anger and nonstop physical violence, the effect of Raging Bull is lyrical.
To witness Jake's fury is to swing through the upper atmosphere of the emotions.
Giving him superb support are two new performers, Joe Pesci, who plays Jake's younger brother Joey, and Kathy Moriarty, a beautiful young blonde woman who's never acted before.
Miss Moriarty comes across with the assurance of an actor's studio veteran as Jake's second wife, Vicky.
Toward the end, Jake, now over the hill, gone to flab and possibly deranged, is thrown into a Miami jail on a morals charge.
Full of self-pity and unfocused rage, he beats his head against the wall of his cell and whimpers, I'm not an animal.
Though there's not one sequence in the film when he hasn't behaved like an animal, Jake, like all the rest of us, is the kind of animal who can ask a question.
At the heart of the film, there's the mystery of Jake himself, but that is what separates Raging Bull from all other fight movies.
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