Leon Gast brings a routine documentary technique to an extraordinary event: "The Rumble in the Jungle," Ali vs. Foreman, 1974. Behind-the-scenes footage, archive footage, interview footage — the standard salad. Originally, Gast's area of concentration was to be the accompanying music festival (James Brown, B.B. King, the Spinners, the Crusaders) in advance of the main event, a totality of sport and entertainment that was intended by the host nation to place Zaire on the world stage, site of a massive pilgrimage of African-Americans to their ancestral home. Gast came back with 300,000 feet of film and no funds to carry on with it. Some twenty years later, Taylor Hackford came into the project, to shoot reminiscing interviews with the likes of Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, both of whom penned eye-witness accounts of the fight and are happy here to rehearse portions of their published reports. (Mailer, always acute on the science of pugilism, is especially illuminating and dramatic.) An archival run-through of Ali's career to that point — the Liston fights, the conversion to Islam, the conscientious objection to the Vietnam War, etc. — is helpful, stirring, but necessarily cursory. And the highlights of the "Rumble" itself, with its famous "rope-a-dope" strategy, do not convey the incredible, incremental, vampiric depletion of Ali's opponent. The movie as a whole, while a fine introduction for a later generation, will without doubt be a richer experience for those who can fill in the blanks on their own. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.