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(More customer reviews)A more appropriate name for the documentary ALI THE FIGHTER would be "Joe Smokes the 'Chump'." For all the pre-fight hoopla shown here and Ali's questionable ring behavior, he came away from "The Fight of the Century" with a swollen face yet still the crowd favorite, while Smokin' Joe Frazier won a unanimous 15 round decision and the appreciation of only a portion of Madison Square Garden's audience.
About the product itself: a decent dub of what is an overly grainy movie. Although footage of the two boxers training or dissin' each other on the phone is entertaining, the gawking at Burt Lancaster at every opportunity plus prize money wrangling and viewing rights negotiations are really dull.
Except for severely edited 1 minute rests, the fight is complete. Shot from several angles, both low and high, near and far, the first thing we notice is there's no ringside commentators. Initially this can be disconcerting but in less than a round I found the silence preferable to all that usual jabber, progress reports and predictions.
At the risk of running afoul of Ali fans, my opinion of the match and the fighter:
He was certainly a boxer of enormous talent, yet after a 3.5 year layoff because of his conscientious objector refusal to be militarily inducted (a move I totally agreed with at the time), Ali's style had changed greatly, as this bout clearly shows. He's not as capable of pulling back to avoid a punch as he was prior to 1968. To his credit, this man could take punches with the best of them.
Tactically, Muhammad relies on hooking his left hand behind Frazier's neck and pushing Joe's head down. Because there's no ringside announcers here, referee Arthur Mercante's many warnings to Ali to stop holding Frazier are very noticeable. These however do little to curtail him. Perhaps a point off Ali's score for every violation after the warning might've been more effective than repeated chidings.
Ali's laying back on the ropes is more acceptable, as Joe didn't have to take the bait at these moments. In a title fight, the challenger must prove himself a better boxer. Joe could easily have backed off, stood at ring center and waited for his opponent to come to HIM.
This was a good fight of intense energy that the best man won. It would've been fitting if the crowd unanimously embraced Frazier after a hard-fought victory (those "A-li" chants never do let up), but such endings only happen in "Rocky" movies.
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