The Greatest (Columbia, EMI Films, John Marshall Productions, 1977)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, October 28) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of interesting films, 1977’s The Greatest on Turner Classic Movies and 1947’s Desire Me on a DVD I’d ordered from Amazon.com and had just got in the day’s mail. The Greatest was a biopic of legendary boxing champion, Nation of Islam member, and anti-war activist Muhammad Ali in which Ali played himself (quite credibly, too) and various members of his entourage also appeared as themselves. It was directed by Tom Gries, a quirky filmmaker best known for his 1968 Western Will Penny, starring Charlton Heston. The film’s closing credits announce that Gries died on January 3, 1977 and it was dedicated to his memory. Apparently Gries lived long enough to finish the actual shooting, but he died before post-production was complete and another director, Monte Hellman, was called in to get the film into releasable form. The Greatest is also known as the movie for which the song “The Greatest Love of All” was written; it was composed by Michael Masser (who also did the film’s background score) with lyrics by Linda Creed, and it was sung under the credits by George Benson. Masser gave an interview in which he explained the inspiration for the song: “Here was a man who wanted to change his name and religion. That’s all. Ali hadn’t believed in the war in Viet Nam and had refused to fight in it. He won that battle through the legal system. Still, he lost everything—including his title. But Ali retained the most important thing of all—his dignity.” The song is best known today for Whitney Houston’s stunning cover, recorded in 1984 and released in 1985, and compared to hers Benson’s sounds pretty lame, but there’s another song in The Greatest, “I Always Knew I Had It In Me,” also sung by Benson (over the film’s closing credits) with lyrics by Carole King’s ex, Gerry Goffin. I ignored The Greatest when it first came out because I assumed it was nothing more than a cheap, crudely made exploitation film. In fact it’s a quite capable piece of filmmaking, written by Ring Lardner, Jr. and an uncredited Bill Gunn (a Black writer and friend of James Dean’s), and unlike a lot of celebrities who got cast as themselves, Ali actually does a creditable job in the role. It helps that the real Ali was such a theatrical person he was already enough of an actor to pull off the task of playing himself.

The film was based on a memoir, The Greatest: My Own Story, Ali co-authored with Herbert Muhammad (son of Elijah Muhammad and Ali’s manager for a time) and Richard Durham, which Ali had published in 1975. Its story takes Ali from his gold-medal win at the 1960 Olympics in Rome (when he was still known as Cassius Clay, Jr., a name he got from the 19th century abolitionist leader and son of Senator Henry Clay; I ran across him in Irving Stone’s historical novel Love Is Eternal, about President Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd, because the 19th century Cassius Clay had briefly dated Todd before she married Lincoln) to the so-called “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in Zaire (before and since known as Congo) in 1974 in which he finally regained the heavyweight world’s championship that had been stripped from him in 1967 when he defeated George Foreman, who had previously taken the title from Ali’s nemesis, Joe Frazier. The teenage Cassius Clay is played by Chip McAllister, whose resemblance to the real Ali is uncanny. According to TCM hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Donald Bogle (a Black writer who’s written extensively on the history of African-Americans in U.S. films), The Greatest was a sufficiently prestigious productions a lot of major stars, both Black and white, wanted to be in it. The cast includes Ernest Borgnine as Ali’s long-time trainer, Angelo Dundee; James Earl Jones as Malcolm X; Roger E. Mosley (who’d played Leadbelly in Gordon Parks’s 1976 biopic of the great blues singer) as Sonny Liston; and Robert Duvall as Bill McDonald, who warns Ali to keep quiet about his change of name and religion (from Christianity to Islam, or at least the oddball variant of Islam practiced by Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam) until after his first heavyweight title fight against Liston. Where The Greatest succeeds most effectively is in dramatizing the sheer extent of the racism Ali had to deal with every day as a young Black man in Louisville, Kentucky (including having to deal with an obnoxious white guy on the grounds of his original white female senior-citizen mentor who orders him off the premises until Clay convinces his Black colleague that he’s been invited) and later (when he’s at a resort cabin warming up for his latest fight, Ali and his entourage are attacked by a white lynch mob with rifles and barely escape with their lives). One wonders watching this movie why more African-Americans didn’t join revolutionary movements and why the mainstream civil-rights movement stayed nonviolent as long as it did.

One item I wish they’d included was the comeback Ali gave to people who questioned how he could be a conscientious objector to military service when he made his living in a violent sport like boxing. Ali said, “That’s different. You don’t go out to kill in boxing.” Also I’m a bit sorry that they chose to open the film with his 1960 Olympic win if only because I’d like it to have included the marvelous story of how Ali got into boxing in the first place. As a child, when two white kids stole his new bicycle, Clay hunted them down and threatened to beat them up – until a white police officer intervened. The policeman offered to take him to a gym to show him a more constructive and socially sanctioned way to get out his aggressive urges. Fortunately, since Ali was playing himself, Gries could use actual footage of his fights to represent them, though I could have done without the cheesy music Masser put under the clips (from the awkward moment in Black musical history when disco was just starting to emerge from what had been R&B and soul). Overall, though, The Greatest was quite good entertainment, and in the scenes dramatizing Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the U.S. Army over his principled opposition to the Viet Nam War it gets even better than that. Ali, Gries, Lardner, and Gunn do a great job showing both Ali’s principles (at one point someone in the U.S. military says that if he cooperates with the draft they’ll use Ali as a morale booster the way they did with Joe Louis in World War II and he won’t have to see combat, and Ali says that would still be supporting a war he doesn’t believe in) and their enormous cost, including being banned from his chosen profession during his potentially peak years. There was a later fiction film about Ali called simply Ali (2001), with Michael Mann directing and Will Smith playing him, and somewhere in my collection I have a two-DVD set containing both The Greatest and Ali. There’ve also been a number of documentaries, including a quite good four-part PBS presentation from 2013 (three years before Ali’s death) produced and directed by Ken Burns.