Ha ha and bon mots, it’s Burl, with a review of a
documentary that presents us with the full story of the non-friendship between
Gore "Shadow Conspiracy" Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.! The picture is called Best of Enemies, and like any decent doc
it manages to give us a nice, polished version of not only that story, but of
the situations and events that surrounded it!
Ha ha, and that’s a pretty appealing prospect for ol’ Burl,
since the times in question – it’s the late 1960s, we’re talking about here –
and the political and social events occurring within them are of special
interest to me! I also once met a fellow whose job was to cat-sit Vidal’s
felines! Yes, this poor soul had to go live in Gore Vidal’s spectacular Italian
cliffside villa, of which we get glimpses in this movie, and live there for four
or five months at a stretch, his most onerous duty to feed the great man’s cats
while Vidal was off living in New York or somewhere! Ha ha, pretty sweet deal!
I can’t say I have any such tenuous connection to Buckley,
which suits me fine because frankly I never much liked the guy, ha ha, and
probably wouldn’t have cared for his catsitter neither! So I’ll happily admit
my sympathies were overwhelmingly with Vidal in the great tête-à-tête
featured in this picture! And of course the contretemps in question happened
over a series of debates during the Republican and Democratic conventions of
1968, during which the ABC network, unable to cover the conventions the way the
other more monied networks did, hired these two high-toned palaverers to debate
the issues of the day!
Their debates mainly ended up as exchanges of erudite
trash-talk, ha ha! Vidal was better at this, though Buckley, despite merely
being smart and not the towering intellectual giant he believed himself to be,
manages many full-throated runabouts that demonstrate a quick wit, but never,
unless I blinked and missed it, a great deal of depth! Ha ha! I guess that’s
the pitfall when you’re trying to mount an intellectual defense of an ideology
that by its nature resists such defense!
Of course this all leads up to the famous blowup which took
place in the ninth of the ten scheduled debates, held in Chicago while police
and protestors engaged in a full on, if rather one-sided, war on the streets
outside! Buckley found himself pushed just that much too far when Vidal called
him a “crypto-Nazi,” and instead of responding with a passionate rebuttal
explaining just exactly why he wasn’t a crypto-Nazi – and I for one would have
been curious to hear such a rebuttal – growled “Ha ha, listen you queer, stop
calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay
plastered!”
Well, this insulting, threatening utterance was the climax
of the debates, and framed the relationship between the two men for the rest of
their lives, and not incidentally helped father a terrible era of insult
journalism which we still suffer today! Ha ha, it’s really too bad! But this is
an entertaining picture, and does a nice job setting the context , and remains
even-handed in its treatment of the protagonists! The set-up is a bit laborious
if you already know anything about these guys, but that’s to be expected I
guess! And it maybe goes a bit hard on milking the drama of the Buckley’s
meltdown, but that’s equally to be expected! The only other major problem is
that we have to look at and listen to that patrician reptile Buckley a lot more
than I’d have cared to, but that’s part of the price of the ticket, ha ha! I
give Best of Enemies three collapsed ceilings!
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