2 Views in the Struggle for Civil Rights : Documentaries: Filmmakers examine the lives of trailblazer Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and the legacy of Earl Warren and courtroom activism.

There could scarcely have been two more different men in public life than Earl Warren and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., yet both had a profound effect on civil rights legislation in the 20th Century.

Their remarkable and engrossing stories are well-told in Richard Kilberg’s 54-minute “Adam Clayton Powell” and Bill Jersey and Judith Leonard’s 88-minute “Super Chief: The Life and Legacy of Earl Warren,” which screen together tonight at 8 at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater as the first offering in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and UCLA Film Archive’s Academy/Contemporary Documentary series.

Powell, who was to head the largest Protestant congregation in America and become the country’s most powerful black politician, was a tall, movie-star handsome orator-playboy born to wealth and position. For decades, he fought boldly and effectively for the rights of his people while at the same time living high with a succession of beautiful wives.

His story is the stuff of tragedy, his downfall brought about by his flagrant self-indulgence and tax troubles--both of which played into the hands of his enemies. How sad it is to hear this man, who did so much to lay the groundwork for the civil rights revolution of the ‘60s, sneer at Martin Luther King Jr.

The many people who knew and worked with Powell suggest persuasively that, for all his well-publicized peccadilloes, he was more sinned against than sinning. Sadly, the hard-drinking man we see aboard his yacht during his Bimini exile surrounded by a bevy of women and nearing the end of his life brings to mind no one so much as Errol Flynn.

In dizzying contrast, Warren--who rose from Alameda County district attorney to California attorney general, then governor and finally chief justice of the United States--was a staunch, devoted family man whose sense of fair play led to the activist Warren Court, which handed down one civil rights decision after another that would have enormous and ongoing effect upon American society.

The great irony of Warren’s life, which the filmmakers cannot avoid (but leave you feeling strongly that they wish they could have) is that as California’s attorney general (and soon-to-be governor), he strongly advocated placing Japanese-Americans in concentration camps. The filmmakers emphasize that Warren subsequently regretted this stand deeply and was haunted by it for the rest of his life.

Yet they downplay this dark chapter in Warren’s otherwise exemplary life to the extent that it tends to undercut the case they make for Warren as a great man, someone who in the view of his own grandson, stood for that which was “beyond the expedient.”

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