Production: USA, 1968
Director: David L. Weiss
Category: Documentary
World Boxing Champion Muhammad Ali (formerly Cassius Clay) had become America’s most famous anti-war protester and “draft dodger”. Ali refused induction into the army on the grounds that he was a black muslim and a pacifist, and therefore obliged to be a conscientious objector. When pressured, he gave the notorious retort: “No Vietcong ever called me nigger”. In May 1967 Ali was stripped of his title and sentenced to 5 years in prison for draft evasion. Weiss, filming a documentary on black Americans and the Vietnam War at the time, titled it after Ali’s quote. Weiss took his 16mm camera up into Harlem and made a stark, verité-style film in which both black civilians and black Viet vets voice the same opinion: it’s not their war. Another documentary filmed during the period of Ali’s exile from the ring was A.K.A. Cassius Clay (Jim Jacobs, 1970); the film focuses on the boxer and stresses how life as a black militant briefly beckoned before he finally returned to reclaim his world champion crown. With archive footage of Clay, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and many others. Even better was William Klein’s Float Like A Butterfly Sting Like A Bee (1969), which eschewed boxing footage completely and concentrated on presenting a portrait of Cassius Clay as a pop culture icon and cultural phenomenon in 1964/65 when he twice beat Sonny Liston, and then moved on to cover his conversion to Islam, name change and growing involvement in race issues. Klein would later expand this film by adding garish color sequences shot during the build-up with Ali’s 1974 fight against George Foreman in Zaire.
Posted by Captain Nightshade