WHEN WE WERE KINGS (75)

Directed by: Leon Gast

Starring: Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Don King, James Brown

The Pitch: The story behind the 1974 Ali-Foreman fight, the "Rumble in the Jungle" held in Kinshasa, Zaire.

Theo Sez: Utterly compelling, even if it's no great shakes in the structure department - it just goes from strand to strand (a consequence of having too much footage, perhaps), presenting each of its various players ; but they're all fascinating, from a Shakespeare-quoting Don King to Zaire's scarily inscrutable President Mobutu to (above all) the magnificent Ali himself, a figure of incredible charisma, intelligence, outspokenness and eccentricity, talking in proto-raps ("If you think the world was surprised / When Nixon resigned / Wait till I kick Foreman's behind!") and using a TV interview to warn "the children of the world" about the importance of brushing their teeth. He also preaches Black Unity, but the film is far too rich and wide-ranging - and irreverent - to become a tract, cheekily showing black-American journalists and artists mispronouncing "Zaire" even as they insist that "Africa is the home of the black man" ; it's the kind of film where Spike Lee - doing his trademark spiel about race relations - comes off looking not so much fiery as extremely boring. It is about being black, and about the chasm between African-Americans and their roots, but it also takes in the Dark Continent's eerie mystique, plus some terrific music (B.B. King is extraordinary), plus the fine art of boxing itself (Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, bluff and patrician respectively, turn a left hook into a work of Art) - and, above all, the sheer pleasure of studying people, what they say and how they say it ; which of course is (or should be) the point in any documentary. Terrific stuff - even for those (like myself) totally uninterested in the sport itself.