This rough, coarse-grained, but revealing and potent ciné-vérité film was begun (in black-andwhite) in Miami in 1964, on the eve of the Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight, by the ex-fashion photographer William Klein and finished (in colour) 10 years later at the George Foreman-Muhammad Ali bout in Zaire.
It's never been seen in the UK, save for a single screening at the Sheffield Film Festival in 2000. Michael Mann's blockbuster, Ali, starring Will Smith and opening next week, has brought it into the ring: a smaller, but worthy contender.
As you'd expect, the early sequences are the most eye-opening: afterwards, hype and hubris, Ali the punchbag turns into a windbag as he psyches himself up ("Nothing is as great as me") in prefight photo-ops.
The Beatles visit him prior to his Liston knock-out, and presciently prostrate themselves on the canvas. And a caucus of rich punters named the Louisville Syndicate, hard men with soft paunches, offer a penetrating peep at the all-white tycoons who ran their "Nig'rah" boy for the championship in order to double their money, not anticipating that Clay would cut loose and turn into "the independent hipster" with his own take on race, religion and America.
Ten years later, the faces surrounding him are no prettier, but all are black.
Not having the film rights to the post-Liston prizefights, Klein resorts to a dramatic collage of ringside photos and catches the stop-start tempo of battle almost as well as Michael Mann's expensively restaged sequences.
Along the way, the threatening prototerrorist Malcolm X - the most dangerous character in both Klein's movie and Mann's - and the palpable Fascism of Mobutu's Zaire ultimately make Ali, the man who boasted of floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, sound as if he's cooing like a dove.
Muhammad Ali - The Greatest
Cert: certPG
