“I'm young, I'm handsome, I'm fast, I'm pretty and can't possibly be beat.” Muhammad AliGood documentaries capture a special, specific moment in time and illuminate it like lightning in a bottle.
Great documentaries take that light and shine it on the audience to help them see what they didn’t really understand about the past so they can better understand their present and their future.
When We Were Kings is a great documentary.
The film, directed by Leon Gast, covers the classic 1976 boxing match – The Rumble in the Jungle -- between George Foreman, the heavy champion of the world at the time, and Muhammad Ali who was, believe it or not, the underdog challenger of the fight.
If all it did was show audiences highlights from the fight while they listened to the pundits of pugilism (Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, Howard Cosell among them), When We Were Kings would be worth watching.
Gast had the vision to look beyond the ring and to see the much bigger picture of two very different Black Americans going back to the land of their forefathers – land those same forefathers were taken from to be slaves in the ‘new world.’ The diversities between the two champions as they relate to their African homeland, which in Gast’s film is a mirror reflection of the problems between the races in America at the time, makes for compelling viewing.
Starring Muhammad Ali, George Foreman.
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