Pariah: The Lives and Deaths of Sonny Liston

I was 12 years old when I watched the Patterson/Liston fight. In those days we paid $3 to watch the fight in the local movie house. Sonny's story is a "rags to riches to rags" story up til his death. When you watch this movie it all makes sense. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time especially back then. The mob ran boxing in the 50's & 60's & Sonny got involved with the wrong people. He was a champ but at the wrong time in boxing history. It's an interesting watch & story with a half a dozen endings.....

Autocue is your friend Mike ! Wow for someone who is supposed to have an overly extended knowledge of the pugilistic arts, why oh why the none expression no passion reading off an autocue ? The ONLY blight on this great documentary !

"Pariah: The Lives and Deaths of Sonny Liston" (2019 release; 99 min.) is a documentary on erstehile heavy weight champion of the world Sonny Liston. As the movie opens, it is :January 5, 1971" and Liston's body is found in his Vegas home. "It didn't even look like him, he had been dead that long", comments a police officer. How exactly did Liston die? We then go back in time to Liston's brutal upbringing in the cotton fields of Arkansas, with a father who beat him just about every day. Liston eventually followed his mom to St. Louis, where things only got worse, and at age 18, he was sentenced 5 ymears for armed robbery. But in jail, Father Stevens guides him towards the prison boxing team... At this point we are 10 min. into the documentary.

Couple of comments: this isn't the first, and likely not the last, documentary about Sonny Liston, asn in particular the mysterious (and still unsolved) circumstances of his death. In 1995, there was the HBO documentary titled "Sonny Liston: The Mysterious Life and Death of a Champion". Now a quarter century later comes this Showtime documentary. Directed by veteran TV documentarian Simon George, "Pariah" brings a lively and colorful assessment of how Charles "Sonny" Liston rose in the ranks of boxing to the eventual top. But it is of course the long descent that makes for the most interesting part of this documentary. We get the usual assorment of talking heads, including the ones who believe fights were fixed and that Liston didn't just die of natural causes (as was concluded by the official investigation). In the end, "Pariah" doesn't cover all that much new territory, nor are there any new revelations. But that doesn't mean this is an uninteresting documentary.

"Pariah: The Lives and Deaths of Sonny Liston" premiered in Fall, 2019 on Showtime and is now avaiable on SHO On Demand and a number of other streaming services, including peacock (where I caught it the other day). If you have any interest in boxing or in a colorful character like Sonny Liston, I'd readily suggest you check this out and draw your own conclusion.

Well, people are evil to each other. This documentary is proof to that. Interesting and really cruel. And also true in that sense that if you are "marked" in life, it's almost impossible to break out. It's coded inside you so deeply... and strangely all the other people feel it somehow. The mobsters in that time period shaped the America as for now, all is more refined and undercover but I believe they are still there, pulling the strings and fixing stuff if possible.

If you like history and boxing combined, watch it! It's really well made. You'll like it.

I'm old enough to remember Sonny Liston and his fights, but I never knew this other side of his life. It's very revealing. I have a new appreciation for the man and the fighter. I liked the different perspectives offered by the various talking heads, and some of the original films are precious.

The weakest part of the film is the "murder" mysteries. But everything else is first class.