Cassius X - Becoming Ali
Muta’Ali Muhammad’s documentary covers five crucial years in the development of Muhammad Ali as the great boxer.
I have a high regard for good documentaries and usually find it unnecessary to adopt the somewhat dismissive view held by some that their natural place is on television rather than in cinemas. However, this piece by Muta’Ali Muhammad reaches me as a work that has a cinema release in the UK and this proves to be a rare instance of my finding in it a work that is all too obviously better suited to being seen on television. That's unfortunate because, that point aside, this is a good piece of work.
Very sensibly, the title of Muta’Ali Muhammad's film indicates clearly what is on offer here. In marked contrast to the recent Golda which misleadingly led people to expect a full-scale biopic of Golda Meir, the very title of Cassius X – Becoming Ali pinpoints the fact that this study of the boxer Muhammad Ali will concentrate on just one part of his life and, indeed, time-wise the chosen scope is limited to the six years between 1959 and 1964. However, there is richness here since the film deals with more than his transformation from a 17-year-old lightweight boxer to the heavyweight champion he became when he took on Sonny Liston and won. As the title further suggests, this is a work which looks at Ali's religious conversion which followed after he was inspired by the words of Elijah Muhammad first heard by him on the radio. It would lead to Clay casting aside the surname bestowed on an ancestor (Clay was simply the choice of a slave owner who elected to use it to identify a man whose real name was lost while the X that was now substituted for it evidenced the fact that the real name of Cassius Marcellus Clay was unknown even to him).
Clay’s new awareness led him to the name change and to membership of the Nation of Islam but in depicting it this film also becomes a wider story. That’s because it tells of the start of the Civil Rights Movement in America and traces in some detail the conflicting outlook of two key figures in it, namely Elijah Muhammad himself and Malcolm X. The latter, seventeen years old older than Cassius X, became a mentor and a friend. However, this would lead to the boxer having to make a choice between them because of the increasingly different ideas of these two men as to how far violent action was justified when protesting about white oppression. On the one hand Cassius X – Becoming Ali is, of course, a sports movie. In studying this phase of Ali’s career, we see footage from three key fights, that with Doug Jones in 1963, that with Henry Cooper in the same year and, of course, the one with Liston in 1964 which made Ali the world’s heavyweight champion. But equally this is a study of American society at a key moment for African-Americans.
In seeking contributors for his film Muta’Ali Muhammad brings in two with strong personal connections to Ali, one being Attallah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X, and the other the singer Dee Dee Sharp who came close to marrying Ali. The others involved are people with a close professional knowledge of Ali be it as writers, scholars or boxing commentators. Well chosen, their remarks are insightful and delivered with strong feelings. All of this makes for an informative film and, if it is certainly not the only documentary about Muhammad Ali, its emphasis on his youthful years makes it admirably detailed. But in any case, there will also be fans for whom another film about their hero cannot be one too many.
Given these qualities it is a shame that as a work being offered in cinemas it is so lacking in anything cinematic. The blend of archive footage and fresh interviews is of course familiar and often workable, but here the interviews are limited to relatively close shots of the individuals all in much the same style making them the very epitome of talking heads while the old material (some of it from TV) offers no contrast that suits the big screen. This results in a work that is weighed down by the fact that it never feels like a movie, but those so taken by the subject-matter that they don't care will find this a rewarding document.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring Robert Lipsyte, Thomas Hauser, Attallah Shabazz, Dee Dee Sharp, Jim Lampley, Jerry Izenberg, Mark Anthony Neal, Damion Thomas, James Small, Greg Fischer, Claude Clegg.
Dir Muta’Ali Muhammad, Pro Jevon Frank and Robert Neill, Screenplay Muta’Ali Muhammad and Mick McAvoy, from the book by Stuart Cosgrove, Ph Marcos Durian and Julian Schwanitz, Ed Charlie Robinson, Music Ollie Howell.
Two Rivers Media/Creative Scotland/MTV Entertainment-Cosmic Cat.
88 mins. UK. 2023. US Rel: 20 February 2023. UK Rel: 13 October 2023. Cert. 12A.
