I remember Robinson and stress his great record because if a film-maker who shared Martin Scorsese's lack of interest in boxing for its own sake (this is his own admission) turned to the middleweight division in modern times, Sugar Ray is by far the most interesting and admirable character he would find. He was one of the heroes of boxing, and - because he was black - he had to fight La Motta six times in nine years. And he was black, smart, very talkative, very funny and a charismatic personality: Ali before Ali. He was regarded as the best pugilist alive, pound for pound. He won the welterweight championship first and, as he bulked up, went on to take the middleweight title five times in his life, making him the living denial of the old adage 'they never come back'. Walker Smith, aka Sugar Ray, was born in Detroit in 1920, and he fought from 1940 to 1965. And the puzzle in the film can start easily with the case of Robinson. Indeed, it is perhaps the best proof we have that a great film can come through when all the director's skills and passions are involved, but when he may not grasp the full nature of what he has done. Raging Bull - about to be re-released - is 27 years old now, and it is as magnificent, as mysterious and murky as ever. There is one great omission, and there are those in America who will not be surprised to discover that he was the black boxer in the division: Sugar Ray Robinson. Raging Bull and Robert De Niro made Jake La Motta the most hallowed and tragic boxer in the movies - apart perhaps from Terry Malloy, who was past it by the time of On the Waterfront, looking like a middleweight who began to hit the pastries. In Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) - a much-admired film once - Paul Newman played rough-and-ready Rocky Graziano, who won his title from Tony Zale. The French champ, Marcel Cerdan, turns up in La Vie en Rose, as well as in Claude Lelouch's Edith and Marcel from 1983, where Cerdan's own son played the boxer in love with Edith Piaf. T he movies seem to have thoroughly covered boxing's 1940s middleweight division.

Raging bull black and white