point of order

Plot

The first and still most important documentary about the McCarthy era of American politics, Point of Order! is a distillation of 188 hours of television coverage of the 1954 hearings during which Senator Joseph McCarthy, through his Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations, accused the U.S. Army of harboring communists in its ranks. The Army countercharged that McCarthy and Roy M. Cohn, the committee's chief counsel, had threatened the Army as a means of obtaining special privileges for Cohn's friend and the committee's special investigator, David Schine, then serving as a private at Fort Dix. The focus is on McCarthy and Cohn behind the hearing room's massive staff tables, and Secretary of the Army Robert Stephens, Army counselor John G. Adams, and special counsel Joseph Welch behind the more modest witness table. McCarthy's fellow committee members become increasingly uneasy with his personal and reckless attacks on anyone who would question his motives, but it is the memorable exchange between McCarthy and Welch, concluding with the counsel admonishing the senator for having no sense of shame that proved to be the highlight of the proceedings. Because the hearings were on national television, it was a moment that also served to undermine McCarthy's support by the White House, his own party, and the American public. As strong as some of director Emile de Antonio's subsequent work was (In the Year of the Pig, Painters Painting), this is the film for which he will be remembered. ~ Tom Wiener, Rovi

Review

Released only ten years after the events it documents, Point of Order! served to remind an often forgetful nation of the excesses its public officials sometimes commit in the name of national security. Filmmaker Emile de Antonio regarded the McCarthy era as a stain on the history of this country, and for visual proof, he had the goods: almost 200 hours of kinescopes (film shot off TV monitors) of the infamous Army-McCarthy hearings of the spring of 1954. The hearings were one of early television's first looks at the workings of government, and though the pictures weren't often pretty, the telecast did have an enormous effect in eroding support, already waning in some quarters, for the Wisconsin senator. De Antonio artfully assembles the hearings' most dramatic moments, keeping the story lines straight and building toward the showdown between McCarthy and Joseph Welch. It is hardly objective history, but then it's impossible to imagine even a McCarthy supporter creating a film that would make the senator look any better than he comes off here. ~ Tom Wiener, Rovi

Cast

Roy M. Cohn

Credit

Elliot Pratt - Associate Producer, Henry Rosenberg - Associate Producer, Emile de Antonio - Director, Robert Duncan - Editor, Emile de Antonio - Producer, Daniel Talbot - Producer

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