Nov 30, 2005
Joe McCarthy DVD
Culled from discarded kinescopes of the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, Emile de Antonio's 1964 documentary, "Point of Order," offers both a complement and a contrast to "Good Night, and Good Luck," George Clooney's docudrama treatment of the McCarthy era currently in theaters. Where Mr. Clooney's hero is a television newsman, Edward R. Murrow, who pushed back against the smear and scare tactics of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign, Mr. de Antonio's protagonist is, in a way, television itself.
In this, the first fully televised Congressional hearing, the medium's unmoved, unblinking eye allowed the nation to see - without commentary from anchormen and special correspondents - just how far the demagogic senator was willing to go in pursuit of his agenda. The turning point, as dramatic now as it must have been then, comes with the response of the Army's chief lawyer, Joseph Welch, to McCarthy's attempt to accuse a minor member of Welch's staff of Communist sympathies: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" The line was so good, and delivered with such down-home conviction, that it earned Welch a prominent role in Otto Preminger's 1959 film, "Anatomy of a Murder."
Of course, the absence of a narrator does not mean that "Point of Order" is purely objective. As Mr. de Antonio, who died in 1989, reveals on the commentary track (assembled from three 1978 interviews), he did not hesitate to reshape and reshuffle the material. The stunning finale, in which the committee room empties out while a discredited McCarthy continues to rant and rave, was actually composed of shots drawn from five or six days of coverage, artfully cut together (by the editor Robert Duncan) to suggest that the entire Senate was turning its back on McCarthy.
The last shot, of the empty hearing room still burning under the bright lights of the television crews, suggests a stage waiting for its players to return - which they would soon enough. "Point of Order" documents the founding of a national repertory company of political theater that continues to pack them in today. New Yorker Video, $29.95, not rated.
In this, the first fully televised Congressional hearing, the medium's unmoved, unblinking eye allowed the nation to see - without commentary from anchormen and special correspondents - just how far the demagogic senator was willing to go in pursuit of his agenda. The turning point, as dramatic now as it must have been then, comes with the response of the Army's chief lawyer, Joseph Welch, to McCarthy's attempt to accuse a minor member of Welch's staff of Communist sympathies: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" The line was so good, and delivered with such down-home conviction, that it earned Welch a prominent role in Otto Preminger's 1959 film, "Anatomy of a Murder."
Of course, the absence of a narrator does not mean that "Point of Order" is purely objective. As Mr. de Antonio, who died in 1989, reveals on the commentary track (assembled from three 1978 interviews), he did not hesitate to reshape and reshuffle the material. The stunning finale, in which the committee room empties out while a discredited McCarthy continues to rant and rave, was actually composed of shots drawn from five or six days of coverage, artfully cut together (by the editor Robert Duncan) to suggest that the entire Senate was turning its back on McCarthy.
The last shot, of the empty hearing room still burning under the bright lights of the television crews, suggests a stage waiting for its players to return - which they would soon enough. "Point of Order" documents the founding of a national repertory company of political theater that continues to pack them in today. New Yorker Video, $29.95, not rated.