newjerseynewsroom.com

BY NANCY R. MANDELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

I never dreamed a documentary about Hugh Hefner — a film subtitled "Playboy, Activist and Rebel" — would stir up nostalgic longings for the good old days. Of course, you have to be at least a Baby Boomer to share my nostalgia for an era way before "Girls Gone Wild," when Tony Curtis was better looking than Brad Pitt, and when the centerfold of a nude Marilyn Monroe catapulted a start-up men's magazine to the upper stratosphere of the publishing world.

But enough self-indulgence. Sure it was exciting to fight for civil rights, abortion and freedom of speech. But what does this documentary have to offer generations who take choice, gay rights and interracial dating for granted? Generations that know Hugh Hefner only as a well-preserved octogenarian with a vast wardrobe of silk pajamas and a predilection for keeping house (if you can call the Playboy Mansion in LA a house) with, literally, bevies of beautiful, buxom women in their 20s? (Overcompensation, he admits, for a monogamous second failed marriage.)

Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Brigitte Berman decided it was time to balance the scales by revealing the Hefner who fought censors, politicians, the Catholic Church and the Christian Right; the Hefner who was branded a pornographer by President Reagan's Meese Commission, who fought a distribution boycott of his magazine, who arranged a lawyer for Lenny Bruce after the comedian's arrest, and who was set up on phony drug charges.

Hef didn't start out as a liberal activist. During the reflective moments he shares with us poring over voluminous scrapbooks in his library, we learn that his happiest memories are of high school, and his adult years began with a conventional marriage (that ended in divorce), a couple of kids and various magazine-editing gigs. In fact, he was working at a magazine for children during the day when by night he was developing the idea for Playboy (conceived as "Stag Party" until a copyright infringement intervened).

Once Hefner recognized that his mission was to liberate America by introducing sex as a natural part of life, he became determined to cast off his own inbred Puritanism. The result was a decision sometime in the early 50s to reinvent himself as the embodiment of the publication, to become in effect "Mr. Playboy." And he has continued to nurture the hedonist image for nearly half-a-century with incredible success.

These are all among the points Berman makes in this occasionally surprising, often funny effort to give equal time to Hefner's more serious accomplishments. But the film is overlong, and Berman's technique is unfocused — a schizoid format that jumps from that reflective Hefner going through his scrapbooks to testimonials (and some times criticism) by too many celebrities (we recognize) and colleagues (we don't); to past events illustrated variously by winsome cartoons or vintage film footage.

The most effective are scenes from Hefner's 1959 late-night syndicated TV program "Playboy Penthouse," a sort of unscripted variety/talk show with a bar instead of a desk and busty women in low-cut dresses arranged like furniture around a glamorous apartment. Because Hef refused to honor the color bar, the show was never picked up by TV stations in the South. What those audiences missed — in addition to the dreaded mixed-race socializing — were terrific performances by Sammy Davis Jr., scat singers Lambert Hendricks & Ross, jazz harmonica legend Larry Adler, Dizzie Gillespie, Bobbie Doyle, the Gateway Singers and Buddy Rich. In the 60s, Hef actually bought back Playboy Club franchises — reportedly at a loss — from the Miami and New Orleans clubs because they turned away black key-holders.

But neither the clubs with their bunny-suited waitresses nor the magazine endeared him to the feminist movement. While Hefner insisted his images of women liberated them, and elevated their status, critics like Susan Brownmiller (shown debating Hef on an old Dick Cavett show as well as in recent interviews) saw the entire Playboy enterprise as degrading, turning women into nothing more than sexual objects. At one point, she even gets Hefner to blush!

Among other on-screen critics is singer and Christian activist Pat Boone, who in no uncertain terms calls Hefner a "pornographer." He goes on to say that Playboy magazine, the philosophy and "attitude of no restraint whatsoever, moral, spiritually, any other way, has contributed more than any other single ingredient to the breaking of the moral compass."

But hands down, the testimonials outweigh the jabs. The Playboy philosopher has clearly won the hearts and admiration of Gene Simmons (quite a deep thinker, it turns out), comedians Dick Gregory and David Steinberg, actor James Caan, an initially reluctant Mike Wallace, Cavett and even football great Jim Brown. And they're not just praising the pictures!

"Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel" opens Friday, July 30.