Doc Watch: That '60s Draft

THE BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION (B) - Talented storyteller Stanley Nelson tackles his most nuanced subject yet, with solid results.

Nelson, who mesmerized with his 2006 take on the Jim Jones death cult, "Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple," also told the story of the Freedom Riders, among other projects over the years for PBS's "American Experience" and "P.O.V." Here he works in the pocket, comfortable with the narrative and his impressive cast of talking heads that include many former members of the Black Panther party from the 1960s and '70s.

In workmanlike fashion, Nelson marches through the history of the movement, neither glorifying it nor demonizing aspects of it. There's not much new ground plowed here, and a lot of the stories are familiar if you've paid attention to the Black Panthers over the years.

Principals like Kathleen Cleaver and Elaine Brown are prominently featured. Other brothers and sisters are on hand to reminisce and testify to the lasting legacy of the Panthers. A few one-liners land nicely. One former colleague says of Eldridge Cleaver, "That boy was crazy!"

We're reminded of the power and charisma of Fred Hampton, as well as his brutal slaying at the hand of Chicago police. (And I never get tired of seeing footage of the Panthers opening up the crime scene to onlookers from the neighborhood.) Eventually we witness the fissures and unraveling, as the group succumbs to the infiltration by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

Ticking near two hours, this is a full helping of history.

BEST OF ENEMIES (B+) - Presaging great battles to come like the Ali-Frazier bouts, William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal went 10 rounds, with the intellectual heavyweights doing verbal battle at the two political conventions in 1968. This smart, engaging documentary does the era justice.

Buckley, the conservative thinker who helped lead the party from Goldwater to Reagan, was known for sparring with ideological opponents on his limp talk show "Firing Line." Vidal, the hedonistic novelist later known for his historical American fiction, had recently dropped the broad satire "Myra Breckinridge" into the stew of the era's culture wars. Their dislike for each other was palpable.

ABC, still a fledgling TV network, positioned itself as providing "unconventional" coverage of the political conventions that would nominate Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. For the first time ever, one of the Big Three networks cut back from gavel-to-gavel coverage, as ABC was on air for only 90 minutes each night. (This way, they could lead off the night with "Bewitched" or "The Flying Nun.") The other innovation was the pairing of Buckley and Vidal to duke it out from each side of the political spectrum, a forerunner of the left-right battles that soon became common on network news shows and endures to this day.

Veteran music documentarians Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville (the latter directed "20 Feet From Stardom") have a blast revisiting not only the pithy patter of Buckley and Vidal but also the Keystone Kops coverage by the under-funded news division of ABC, led by anchor Howard K. Smith and reporter Sam Donaldson. The filmmakers expertly weave in archival footage, including classic clips of Mayor Daley's gestapo squad bashing hippies' heads in. Lively talking heads include Christopher Hitchens, Dick Cavett and Todd Gitlin. Reading from the memoirs of Buckley and Vidal are Kelsey Grammer (Buckley) and John Lithgow (Vidal).

The movie climaxes with near fisticuffs -- the famous exchange in which Vidal calls his rival a crypto-fascist, goading Buckley into threatening to punch his "queer" opponent in the nose. Cavett, looking back, gets off a brilliant one-liner: "The network nearly shat."

This is a brisk, fond look back at a quirky moment in TV news coverage, when two masters of the political polemic landed in America's living rooms and left their mark.

BONUS TRACKS
Two fine trailers: