1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Smokin' Joe the Fighter, April 21, 2010
This review is from: Ali - The Fighter (DVD)
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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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"You Gotta Come Out For Every Round.", November 11, 2009
This review is from: Ali - The Fighter (DVD)
Forget about the first half-hour of this film. It's fairly standard Ali-Frazier pre-fight hype. The value of this film is that it shows us the first Ali-Frazier fight in its entirety. No announcers, no interruptions.
And it was a *great* fight. Homeric in its impact.
Muhammed Ali fought some really tough, brutal, vicious fighters
- Sonny Liston, Ernie Shavers, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Ken Norton. As such, it must have occurred to him before he fought these guys that he might not just lose the fight but that these guys might very well beat him to death in the ring -- that's how powerful they were as punchers!
In his book, "The Fight," Norman Mailer points out that in order to get to his side of the hotel lobby to train in Zaire, Ali had to pass by where George Foreman was training, and as Ali passed by, Foreman made it a point at that moment to be wailing away on the heavy bag. THWAP! THWAP! THWAP! ... Solely for Ali's benefit. ... Just to put the frightening thought of those monsterous puncher in Ali's head.
Getting back to Joe Frazier ... Interestingly enough, Joe Frazier was not physically bigger than Ali. In this 1971 fight, Ali was 10 pounds heavier than Frazier; taller; more muscular; had a noticeably longer reach; and was a far better boxer than Frazier.
But Joe Frazier was a wild man. He never backed up.
You could see in Ali's eyes along about the third round what he was probably saying to himself: "This guy is crazy! I'm hitting him with everything I've got and he still keeps coming!" In whatever round that thought came to Ali, and it most certainly did plant itself in Ali's mind, it was at that point that Ali lost the fight.
In a street fight, with the gloves off and anything-goes, Ali must have realized that Frazier could indeed have beaten him to death. But in the ring -- and outside the ring -- Frazier knew that Ali was in charge. He might defeat Ali, which he did in this fight, but Ali even in defeat commanded the ring.
After the fight, Ali, while bruised, was able to face the press in the days immediately following the fight, while Frazier was laid up in the hospital for several days, some say with serious injuries.
In my opinion, Ali made two major mistakes in the fight. One, he tried the "Rope-a-Dope" on Frazier; a strategy that proved to be George Foreman's undoing in 1974, but Joe Frazier is no George Foreman. Where Ali *fired* off the ropes in Zaire once Foreman punched himself out, Frazier just kept punching and punching and punching while Ali lay on the ropes: to where Ali had nothing coming off the ropes in the way of a blitz against Frazier.
The other mistake Ali made was that after the first couple rounds Ali fought flat-footed for the rest of the fight. Clearly the better boxer, Ali chose to slug it out with Frazier. Big mistake.
Had Ali fought Frazier the way Sugar Ray Leonard defeated Marvin Hagler, Ali would have won at least 2 or 3 additional rounds simply by virtue of outboxing and outclassing Frazier.
I wonder if Ali's decision to slug it out with Frazier came as a surprise to Angelo Dundee. Despite his respect for Dundee, Ali would often "chart his own course" in the ring, the advice of ringside-seconds notwithstanding.
All during the fight Frazier kept hitting Ali with left hooks; left hooks that Frazier delivered as if throwing a discus. Finally, in the 15th round Frazier tagged Ali with an absolutely gorgeous left hook, a wallop that may go down in boxing history as the most perfect punch thrown in a heavyweight fight. Frazier didn't just knock Ali down with that punch, he entered his psyche!
Almost immediately after Ali fell to the floor, he rose to his feet. It was at that moment that "Ali the Legend" was born. The way he stood there in the corner taking an eight-count showed the world that Muhammed Ali was for real. His demeanor during and after the fight were that of a true sportsman. He never complained about the fight, never offered any excuses.
It's interesting that this fight took place in March of 1971, six years after Ali announced that he no longer wanted to be called Cassius Clay -- and yet there are people in the documentary section of the film, including the obnoxious, know-nothing, ever-present Jim Jacobs, who continued to call him "Clay." Six years later. Think about that.
There's also the issue of the scoring by the judges. One judge scored it 11-4 Frazier. Preposterous! Then again, Ali knew he had to win the fight by a knockout, no old school boxing judges were going to give a black militant war resister any kind of a break in 1971 -- believe it!
You can see Ali at the beginning of the 15th trying valiantly to do just that, knock out Frazier. But it was impossible. Joe was too young, too strong, too tough and too crazy to go down. It wasn't going to happen. And Ali knew it. Still, Ali finished the round: itself an act of pure, unadulterated courage.
No doubt Ali figured out Frazier for their second fight, "The Thriller in Manila." I think he realized that a Joe Frazier older by four years *would* tire at some point in the fight -- although Ali up to the 15th round must have wondered "WHEN?!!!"
There was one great moment in the 1975 Manila fight when Angelo Dundee looks over at Frazier's corner between the 14th and the 15th rounds and sees, before anyone else in Ali's corner, that Frazier is giving up, that he's not going to answer the bell for the 15th round and that the fight is over. And Dundee turns to tell Ali what he just saw -- that he wouldn't have to go out for the 15th round -- AND MY GOD! THE LOOK ON ALI'S FACE! The hangman had spared him.
All I can say about Muhammed Ali that I know for absolutely certain is that he meant the world to me and to a great many of us who grew up in the 1960s. When Ali lost the first fight to Joe Frazier in 1971, right smack dab in the middle of the Vietnam War, sure, it was a disappointment; but his standing up and "speaking truth to power," not just to the boxing world but to the imperialists who run the military-industrial complex -- that takes a real champ; in and out of the ring. And he sure had 'em -- balls down to the ground.
And don't let no sanitized US Post Office commemorative stamp tell you anything different. The US government would have liked to have *buried* Muhammed Ali, and Malcolm X, and Langston Hughes, and a lot of others who spoke out *when* they were speaking out. Now however, years later, they print postage stamps in their honor! But be not deceived, the fates are not mocked, Muhammed Ali was a brother to millions of people the world over.
Some people say Ali should have just "stayed down" when Frazier tagged him with that Olympian left hand in the 15th round -- knocked him on his ass and, in effect, won the fight -- but Ali got right back up. ... Some people say Ali should have just plain given up when he was fighting Joe for the second time in Manila. But as Ali said after the fight: "When you're the champ, you gotta go out for every round." And indeed he did. Both as a fighter and as a citizen.
Thanks, Champ.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fight of the Century, January 14, 2009
This review is from: Ali - The Fighter (DVD)
I knew of this fight from the constant discussions about it among my classmates during the weeks prior to the event when I was in grade school. Since that time, I've always been haunted by the mystic of this bigger-than-life event and was curious to see the whole 15 rounds. The mystic that I mention had to do with the reported intensity of this fight and the physical damage done to both fighters. My curiosity was further raised when I was in college and happened to come across a library book documentary about the first Ali-Frazier bout authored by Jose Torres, the title of which escapes me. His virtual round by round coverage of the fight itself was absolutely mesmerizing and made me want to see it all the more! Finally, in the mid 1980's, they played this documentary, which was titled as "The Fight" on TV, and apparently it's the same documentary as "Ali The Fighter". You can bet I had my VCR set to record it! Finally, after all these years, I was about to see this very elusive event for myself.
Well, all I can say, as a long-time boxing fan, is that this fight was the most fast-paced, intense, vicious boxing match that I had ever witnessed. I could not believe that two heavyweights could fight at the pace that these two great champions fought at and had sustained the punches that they received from one another! It certainly lived up to everything I've heard about it, and I've never seen any other boxing match that contained the amount of drama that this one had.
The media likes to talk about the Thrilla In Manilla as a classic, but I have to differ with them on that. By the time of the Thrilla In Manilla, both fighters had lost a lot of their speed, fluidity, and dynamic fighting style, where in the first fight, they were both much faster, sharper, and more lethal. There are those that say that Ali was past his prime when he came out of his exile, but to me, anyone who could dish out and receive the kind of punishment that Ali had sustained over those 15 hellishly-paced rounds from an righteously angry, relentless killing machine such as Joe Frazier, had to be a well-conditioned fighter. Although I has never personally liked the 1960's and early 1970's Ali, I had to deeply respect this man for the courage he displayed in this fight. To see him take that murderous left-hook of Frazier in the 11th round which was hard enough to buckle his knees, and come back to fight valiantly for the remaining rounds, brought a tear to my eyes. And how he ever got up so quickly, (considering he managed to get up in the first place) from such a devastating, picture-perfect left-hook during the 15th round, I'll never know. This man, with the "pretty face", was every bit as tough as Frazier.
Since I had misplaced my VHS recording of this great documentary, I'm going to put in my order for the DVD being sold on this site.
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