To avoid dismissive non-attendance as lightweight titillation, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel should have dropped name-recognition main title and stuck with its however blah subtitle. At a post-New York première screening session during the Museum of Modern Art’s annual Canada Front, CBC documentarist of U.S. culture Brigitte Berman indicated that Hef had originally contacted her for a copy of her 1981 film on jazzman Bix Beiderbecke -- six years later her Artie Shaw won the Best Feature Documentary Oscar -- and that, at his eightieth birthday bash, she had conceived of this newest one, on which carte blanche was given.

The German-born filmmaker uses no narrational line here, so as “not to put in my own point of view”; and although pro- or begrudging interviewees far outnumber naysayers, except for the briefest ironic document juxtapositions for Jerry Falwell, the film steers clear of editorializing.

A mite long at two hours plus four minutes, the work is complete in its avowed purpose of revealing the side of its subject overshadowed by success, bosoms and lifestyle image. Going from 1926 up to today, this is not exactly biography, for the Methodist Midwest childhood is short-shrifted in ill-advised animation and best imaged near the close when he dances with fellow geezers at a high school class of ‘44 reunion.

A close brother and adult daughter talk for seconds, and there are home movies of two ex-wives, the children when young, and current live-in Bunnies with rhyming names. As the man admits in lengthy interviews, permanent relationships are not his thing. This once Dexedrine-fortified workaholic’s obsession, and life-partner, is not just Playboy but the change it could help bring about in politics, race relations and individual freedom.

The 1953 magazine first to be titled “Stag Party,” financed with a begged-and-borrowed pittance and put together on a living room table, may not have begun with a social calendar to go along with the Marilyn and Playmate ones. Though sales topped Esquire’s, the clothes and cars and Clubs, the Big Bunny “stretch version of the DC-9” and Mansion and connoisseurs were adopted without meaning much to the straight (aside from young women) man who drinks no wine, does no drugs, cares little for haute cuisine and prefers pipe, pj’s and burgundy robe.

Hef’s “laser eye” supervised every detail, as the “Philosophy” and then “Forum” championed sexual liberation -- for men, insist feminist detractors -- while the wide-ranging interviews, articles, fiction and cartoons gave first-amendment voice to the already celebrated, the notorious, and problematic newcomers who were to become so.

Unknown or forgotten is the enterprise’s push for an end to the war and to homophobia, for abortion rights and, in the widest sense, for tolerance. On the popular Playboy’s Penthouse and then Playboy after Dark, races, sexual orientations and political views mingled as television brought jazz, pop and protest folk into living rooms, and stand-up comedians and other entertainers gained audiences otherwise denied them because of race or politics.

There were antagonists, still are. Many declined interview requests, and the most prominent of those who do appear are Pat Boone, with family, social and religious objections, and Susan Brownmiller (also in the MoMA audience), charging male exploitation of women.

Representative or not, the other side of the coin is given overwhelming weight, growing in fact redundant after making its point in spades. Some are b&w faces from TV and archival footage, most are current color, and the A-list is too long to detail and filled with surprises and nostalgia. There are doubters like Joan Baez, who did it for the public forum, and Mike Wallace, who did not like Nightwatch guest Hefner but has since done a near one-eighty.

Viewers may snigger at the octogenarian stroke-survivor squeezed among lovelies a quarter his age, even while director Berman reported his health “astounding.” Whether man and magazine grew with or lucked into the times or was in the forefront of change, or all of the above, is unprovable. Quiet, “not a protestor with a loud mouth,” Hugh M. Hefner does not in the end reveal what is inside him. But Dr. King’s “dream was part of my dream, too.”

(Released by Phase 4 Films and rated "R" for graphic nudity and sexual content.)