‘The Trials of Muhammad Ali’ covers Ali’s toughest bout: his battle to overturn a five-year prison sentence for refusing US military service in Vietnam. Prior to becoming the most recognizable face on earth, Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali and found himself in the crosshairs of conflicts concerning race, religion, and wartime dissent. ‘Trials’ zeroes in on the most controversial years of Ali’s life, when an emerging sports superhero chooses faith and conscience over fame and fortune.
To this day, Muhammad Ali is an international icon, the subject of books, feature films (including one he starred in as himself) and documentaries. The latest “The Trials of Muhammad Ali,” deals specifically with the time he spent fighting his conviction on draft evasion in 1967. During that time, he was stripped of his boxing license and unable to fight.
Instead, he made his living as a speaker, supporting his growing family with then wife Khalilah Comacho-Ali by traveling and talking openly about his resistance to the Vietnam War, racism and his conversion to the Nation of Islam. He fought his draft evasion case all the way to the Supreme Court, ultimately winning, but not without collateral damage to his career and his reputation.
“When I heard [director Bill Siegel] was doing it, I was very honored because he contacted me,” Camacho-Ali says. “I was there. Other times when they do a lot of things on Ali [when] I was there, I knew exactly what was happening, nobody asks me anything. Even when they did the “Ali’ movie, nobody asked me. I felt like Moses, like I was written out of the tablets or something.”
In “The Trials of Muhammad Ali,” people like Camacho-Ali and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan are interviewed, people who haven’t shown up in other documentaries. Tom Joyner, a lifelong fan of Ali’s who hung around the Champ’s camp as a teenager and has watched all the Ali docs, says that even he learned something from this latest project on Ali’s extraordinary life.
This new doc may not be the last look at Ali. Camacho-Ali, known as Belinda Ali when she was married, had four children with the champ before divorcing him after the “Thrilla In Manila.” Ali brought Veronica Porsche, who would become his third wife (and Laila Ali’s mother) along to the Philippines, publicly humiliating Comacho-Ali , who was memorably played in the movie “Ali” by Nona Gaye.
The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013)
Directed by: Bill Siegel
Starring: Muhammad Ali
Film Editing by: Aaron Wickenden
Music by: Joshua Abrams
MPAA Rating: None.
Studio: Kartemquin Films
Release Date: August 23, 2013
Visits: 39
