Take an epic sporting event, cut together the highlights and interviews with the athlete (or athletes) and coach (or coaches), and you have an instant crowd-pleaser, because the crowd already been pleased once and knows it will be again. I expected Thriller in Manila to be that documentary until the build up of “the greatest fight of all time” between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier unexpectedly wheezes, as a 63 year old, nearly incoherent Frazier walks into his decrepit Badlands of Philadelphia gym. With one shot of the little, cluttered room he lives in upstairs, the tone shifts to the unapologetic telling of Joe Frazier’s side of the story. Director John Dower has an easy target (Ali can’t speak for himself anymore), but to his credit he lets the camera remain on the mixed emotions of people closest to the fight and thereby raises issues–and the film–above its genre.
Through talking heads with the gray hairs who were there, archival footage and the relentless narration of Paterson Joseph, we go back to the late sixties when Joe Lewis and Muhammad Ali are friendly competitors. Joe Lewis personally lobbies President Nixon to get Ali back in the ring after Ali’s famous refusal to go to Vietnam for his religious convictions (a member of the all-black Nation of Islam). Back in the ring, Ali and Frazier go on to have three fights in a vicious rivalry that’s the stuff of sports legend and Greek tragedy. It all culminates in 1975 when Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos hosts the “Thrilla in Manila,” the third and final bout between Frazier and Ali.
Much of the film dwells on Ali earning his Great American Hero status more for his publicity skills than his fighting skills. Joe Frazier was an uneducated sharecropper’s son who grew up in Beauford County, SC, where he still couldn’t cash a check even after he became the World Heavyweight Champion of Boxing. He’s presented as the real black working class champion, even though Ali’s radical political views and charismatic spirit made him an icon of 60’s political activism. Ironically, Frazier’s fans were usually white conservatives who admired his quiet, dogmatic work ethic.
With Joe Frazier’s vicious left hook, it appears Thriller is going to pound Ali’s mythic image into the floor. The tipping point of the title fight and the film, happens when Lewis introduces his newly developed right jab, causing Ali to have to rethink how he’d protect his left side in mid-match. This turns the bout from a shoo in for Ali into a bloodied, epic war between the two men. At this point, Dower upends his own Ali exposé when Frazier’s drive to “take apart” the man who’d derided him for years as an Uncle Tom, sends Thriller flailing at religious fundamentalism, the group think of The Media, black on black racism and even the corruption between professional boxing and dictator regimes (Imelda Marcos, although married to a ruthless dictator, could not take sitting ringside anymore during the fight because it was too violent). All factors are complicit in what made “the greatest fight” the one neither man really walked away from.
The exhaustion Thriller creates in the audience by its conclusion has less to do with the typical drama of boxing that movies like Rocky revel in. As they pound and pound each other, each man exhibits an almost supernatural willpower to go on, but unlike Rocky, that heroic willpower may be the very thing that has crippled their twilight years. “Each one is Ahab and the other is the Black Whale,” Ali’s biographer says. Although Thriller in Manilla is heavy-handed at times, taking a sports history documentary and infusing it with Moby Dick horror is definitely something to behold. Unless you’re queasy like Imelda Marcos.
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