Both films involve a Mafia boss successfully crushing the protagonist’s conscience, and include a small but significant element that I’d call “the vanishing first wives.” And, of course, both films star Robert De Niro (whose appearance is significantly altered in both films) and co-star Joe Pesci (his first major role is in “Raging Bull”). The connections with “The Irishman” are significant, for instance, both in subject and in style, starting with the flashback framework.

It’s impossible to see “Raging Bull” without the hindsight of Scorsese’s career since. The story is told as a flashback from 1964, when La Motta, fat and scarred and thick-voiced, prepares in a tawdry little dressing room to take the stage in a club and recite doggerel it cuts back to 1941, when he was making his hard climb from obscurity and enduring his first defeat, and continues through his rise as a boxer-and it doesn’t so much document his fall as reveal him to have been as base at the time of his great successes and colossal failures as he was at the very start. He opened a night club, did jail time for procuring an underage girl for his male customers, and became a raconteur and monologuist in New York night spots. “Raging Bull,” of course, is a bio-pic of Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro), who was raised in the Bronx in an immigrant Italian family and became the middleweight champion of the world in 1949, losing his title two years later and then losing his zest for the sport. Strangely, I didn’t rewatch the film for many years-even after the start of what I consider the Scorses-aissance, the astounding outburst of creative inspiration that followed “The Departed” (more specifically, his Oscar for “The Departed”) and has marked his past decade of films, from “Shutter Island” to “The Irishman.” Finally, this week, I did.

I was a recent college graduate on my first job (in commercials) and a Scorsese-phile on the basis of the three films of his that I’d seen: “Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” and, above all, “New York, New York,” none of which prepared me for the blend of austerity and fury, abstraction and physicality in “Raging Bull,” which I’ve considered, ever since, a high point of Scorsese’s work. The first movie première that I ever attended was the one for Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” at the Ziegfeld, in the fall of 1980, thanks to a friend with connections.

Robert deniro in raging bull