By the time the Rumble in the Jungle heavyweight world championship bout took place in Kinshasa in October 1974, Muhammad Ali was considered past his prime, standing almost no chance against a ferocious George Foreman, then 24 years young and undefeated. Despite this, Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings predominantly thinks in terms of the dialectic between Ali’s boundless charisma and Forman’s impervious aloofness, rather than the one between the former’s age and speed and the latter’s youth and brute strength. Ali was a 7-to-1 underdog heading into the fight, and his arrogance in the face of those odds, along with his wit, eloquence, and sense imagination, makes him a compelling, complicated, and compulsively watchable screen presence. And his fearless, vociferous activism in black communities and political dissent to American imperialism made him a fitting hero to his thousands of African fans, who swarmed him everywhere he went in the weeks leading up to the main event.
With Ali in the spotlight, When We Were Kings relegates Foreman unwittingly to the role of supporting player, a dour but menacing villain who’s seen primarily in glimpses, leaving impossibly huge dents in punching bags or speaking without any hint of emotion to the press. All the while, Ali is front and center, thriving in his leading role as the lovably mischievous, and all-too-cocky, David to Foreman’s Goliath—riffing poetically throughout press conferences and feeding off the energy of his loyal fans, whose constant chants of “Ali, bombaye!” (or “kill him!”) pumped him full of just enough gusto to allow him to actually believe half the things he said about destroying the seemingly unbeatable Foreman.
But Gast doesn’t cast Ali as the heroic underdog merely to set up the potentially monumental upset that comes to pass. Ali also serves as the embodiment of black unity, the de facto face of the Rumble in the Jungle; the fight was paired with Zaire 74, a music festival that featured all-black musical acts, including James Brown, B.B. King, Bill Withers, and a slew of African musicians. While aboard a plane in Africa, Ali quips, “All-black pilots, an all-black crew? The American negro could never dream of this.” It’s this ideal of communal solidarity and empowerment that Ali sought during this trip to his self-declared homeland, and which he hoped would reverberate back in America. As Gast and his crew capture Ali’s oratory ingenuity and intense training, as well as snippets of remarkable concert footage, When We Were Kings becomes a celebration of not just one man, but of black excellence as a whole.
Lurking beneath this fascinating, one-of-a-kind event, though, lies an undercurrent of nefariousness. Organized by none other than Don King, the shrewd huckster who later cheated Mike Tyson and other boxers out of millions of dollars, the fight was funded entirely by Zaire’s brutal dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, who, like King, used the event as a means to further his career and enrich himself. The ultimate goal of putting artistic, organizational, and monetary control into the hands of black talent certainly created a general sense of harmony and some genuinely inspirational moments, such as when dozens of African-American musicians jam and dance together during their flight to Africa. But the film also acknowledges the complicated and, perhaps necessarily, compromised nature of such a bold undertaking.
As the editing of the initially commissioned film didn’t begin until nearly two decades after Ali knocked out Foreman, Gast also judiciously employs talking heads, filmed in the mid-1990s, to help contextualize the cultural significance and impact of the fight and festival, and address the questionable behind-the-scenes dealings and Ali’s legacy as both a boxer and activist. With everyone from Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, who covered the fight from Zaire, to black artists, Spike Lee and Malick Bowens, on hand to offer fascinating and divergent perspectives on the events as they occurred and attest to their lasting importance, When We Were Kings provides a prismatic view of one of the biggest sports spectacles of the 20th century. It seamlessly captures the event’s politically radical undercurrent, and with both a tactile sense of urgency in its vérité archival footage and a reflectiveness about the role athletes can play in affecting social change, along with the inevitable costs that comes with it.
Image/Sound
Although the Criterion Collection’s release boasts a new, restored 4K digital transfer, this is a prime example of a film whose source materials benefit only modestly from a high-resolution restoration. The image is consistently bright, but this only exacerbates the film’s frequently blown-out and wildly shifting color tones from one scene to the next. Clarity is also incredibly erratic, with certain shots exuding a sharpness and depth of detail that one expects from a 4K restoration, while others are quite hazy and soft, even for 16mm footage shot on the fly over 40 years ago. Obviously, there’s only so much to be done with overexposed archival footage—which was also not helped by sitting in the can for nearly two decades before being compiled into the finished film—but the final result is less than impressive. Fortunately, the 5.0 surround DTS-HD audio soundtrack is nicely layered, with a richness to background and crowd noises, and is particularly booming during the musical interludes.
Extras
Cut from the same footage used for When We Were Kings, Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte’s 2008 documentary Soul Power serves as a perfect companion piece to Leon Gast’s earlier film, focusing primarily on the Zaire 74 music festival that was scheduled to take place right before the Rumble in the Jungle, prior to the fight’s six-week delay. The behind-the-scenes footage focuses a bit too much on the organization and construction of the festival, but the concert footage itself is impressive, featuring a typically electrifying and sweaty James Brown (donning an elaborate black-and-blue one-piece, bejeweled in pearls), Bill Withers, B.B. King, and a slew of remarkably talented African performers, including Fania All-Stars with Celia Cruz.
The only other disc extras are a pair of interviews: one with producer David Sonenberg, who delves into the process of getting When We Were Kings made, and another with Gast, who discusses how supportive Muhammad Ali was during filming, in stark contrast to a belligerent and uncooperative George Foreman. A fascinating essay by critic Kelefa Sanneh susses out both the complexities and contradictions of the Black Power politics espoused by Ali, Don King, and Mobutu Sese Seko, and also touches on the countless challenges of mounting the music festival and, later, getting both When We Were Kings and Soul Power made.
Overall
Criterion’s new 4K transfer may not be a radical leap forward from earlier ones of When We Were Kings, but this release attests to the enduring power of Leon Gast’s documentary.
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