Best of Enemies

Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon's gripping doc is structured like a boxing movie, but in this case the pugilists are intellectual heavyweights. In the Left’s corner is the wily Gore Vidal, while the puce-faced William F. Buckley, Jr is the Right’s more volatile champion. Both come out swinging in ten TV debates in 1968 that help lay the seeds for the didactic nature of today’s political punditry.

The head-to-heads between the pair are delightfully urbane and catty: "he's always to the right and always in the wrong," is a typical Vidal zinger. By debate nine, however, things get dirty. Vidal lands the first low-blow, calling war hero Buckley a “crypto-Nazi”. His grinning opponent turns apoplectic: “Now listen, you queer,” Buckley barks. “Stop calling me a Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face, and you’ll stay plastered.” No, we don’t know what he means by the last part either, but it made great television. (“The network shat,” says one onscreen interviewee.) In Neville and Gordon’s hands, it makes for a great movie too.