Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, as most people know from the "ism" that still bears his name, was a ruthless and opportunistic politician who leaped onto the anti-communist bandwagon in 1950 and almost instantly tried to position himself as grand inquisitor over all issues of treason, loyalty and patriotism. By 1954, however, his power was fading and his attacks on a presumably Red-leaning State Department began to seem even more illogical once his own party had taken over the White House. Making enemies was second nature for McCarthy, but his fall from glory came when he set his sights on a new and particularly ill-chosen target: the U.S. Army. McCarthy went after an Army dentist who had refused to answer a loyalty survey and, even worse, had taken the Fifth when testifying before the senator's committee; then he launched into a personal attack on celebrated Brig. Gen. Ralph Zwicker. The Army retaliated by letting it be known that the senator and his assistant, Roy Cohn, had announced their intention to "wreck the Army" for its failure to grant special privileges to a recent draftee, David Schine. (Cohn and Schine, described somewhat suggestively as "very close friends," had made a highly publicized tour of Europe a year earlier, attempting to remove subversive material from the libraries of U.S. offices). What began as an almost unresolvable round of name-calling and accusation turned into three months of hearings that finally allowed America to see McCarthy as the vicious and irrational combatant he was. By the time the hearings came to an end, the once-snarling senator was weaving like a punch-drunk boxer, barely aware of what had hit him.
Emile De Antonio, in his 1964 documentary Point of Order!, recently released by New Yorker Home Video, used the simplest means possible to get to the heart of the hearings: He simply let the events and participants speak for themselves without any kind of narration or exposition. This was De Antonio's first film (his later films include Millhouse, In the Year of the Pig, Painters Painting and Underground), and his minimalist method of simply editing archival footage -- in this case, 188 hours of footage from CBS News -- was so radical that the New York Film Festival rejected it as being no more than recycled television. Though the hearings were 10 years in the past, De Antonio presumed that his audience would recall the names and issues, just as a film audience in 2009 may well recall the names of Linda Tripp and Betty Currie without prompting. Or perhap he merely enjoyed the perverse logic of letting the innuendoes and grandstanding hold their own.
De Antonio adds no direct commentary to the footage, but that doesn't mean Point of Order! is a dry, objective page of history -- far from it. This is a story of good triumphing over evil, of two men going into battle. McCarthy is the dark knight, his opponent the simple and good Joseph Welch, the Army's counsel. They lock swords again and again until, finally, McCarthy's last underhanded trick, an attempt to embarrass Welch by exposing the political past of one of his employees, backfired. Welch responded with a powerful rebuttal: "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness...." he began. His now-famous rhetorical question "Have you left no sense of decency?" was the magic spell that ended McCarthy's reign of terror, and in the final moments of the film De Antonio shows the senator trying to carry on with his smear tactics, only now lost in the middle of the departing crowd as they ignore him.
(Welch wasn't the only hero of the day; the film adds as a coda a fine moment by Missouri Sen. Stuart Symington, in debate with McCarthy, telling him, "The American people have had a look at you.... You're not fooling anyone, either.")
Point of Order! is an extraordinary document that should be seen by anyone with an interest in the history of this century. Besides its obvious historical value as a record of the hearings, it shows the members of Congress clumsily adapting to the new medium of television, unaware that their colleagues of later decades will become seasoned performers for the camera. They play to the cameras, bring in oversized props and even awkwardly place unfriendly parties side-by-side simply so that both will be on camera. The camera is an intrusion, even an embarrassment, but by the end it has changed the very nature of the hearings, forcing the participants to take notice of a new factor in political discourse: the audience. More important, it's a record of a small but important victory, a moment in which hateful rhetoric and unprincipled behavior are softly but soundly defeated by the force of reason. Will the low politics and partisan squabbles of today ever find such a moment? Will a De Antonio of the next century find a way to make sense of the events of the last few years? I doubt it.
SIMPLE INTEREST: When I was in high school in the 1970s, there could be found in every English-literature class some student whose critical views could be reduced to a single thesis: "That guy must have been high." Though the simple-minded search for a chemical inspiration for every metaphor or symbol may have fallen out of fashion, its counterpart in contemporary scholarship may be the practice of outing historical and literary figures, the kind of facile speculation on sexuality that claims to have cast a new light on the likes of William Shakespeare, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Huckleberry Finn and Tinky Winky.
Those who don't mind gossip and rampant guesswork taking the place of scholarship will probably find much to enjoy in Mark Rappaport's The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender (Water Bearer Video), a clever and almost convincing argument for a gay subtext to the cinema of the past. Rappaport has scoured the video shelves for just about every limp wrist, every sissy joke, every cross-dressing scene or effeminate gesture in the combined ouvres of Danny Kaye, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Randolph Scott, John Wayne and Walter Brennan and even takes a side step into European films just to draw attention to a few homoerotic moments in the work of Luchino Visconti. (Gosh! The director of Death in Venice and The Damned was gay? Who would have guessed?)
It's a clever performance, more effective than Rappaport's earlier attempts to convert old movies into a lesson in Semiotics 101, but much of its cleverness is simply an effort to disguise the faulty reasoning. Rappaport's film clips -- often taken out of context, or barely acknowledging the possibility of other, more likely readings -- rest on two misconceptions: that audiences of the '30s and '40s simply didn't see or understand the things that we, the more enlightened souls of 1999, can now recognize (Rappaport ignores most of the more overt references to homosexuality that would call this into question, though he includes Cary Grant's classic line "I just went gay all of a sudden" from Bringing Up Baby), and that what he defines as gay messages and imagery in the films of the studio era emerged subconsciously (a notion that simply disregards the way films were made in Hollywood and implies that "sissy" comic actors like Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton were unaware of their own images).
The Silver Screen is provocative, even insightful, but as film history it's lazy, preferring the easy laughs of camp to getting its facts straight.
SHELF LIFE: Disney has just released two new videos -- the documentary Frank and Ollie, an intimate look at animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, the last of Disney's "Nine Old Men"; and the original, animated version of 101 Dalmatians (though the latter will be withdrawn from stores in 101 days -- which is longer than The Rescuers lasted in stores!).
March 16 was a busy day at the video stores, but though The Waterboy will probably be taking up most of the shelf space, there are alternatives. From First Run Features, two documentaries, Krzysztof Kieslowski: I'm So-So, about the Polish director of The Decalogue and the Three Colors trilogy; and Paul Monette: The Brink of Summer's End, about the author of Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir and Becoming a Man. From Kino on Video, Alexei Balabanov's Russian gangster movie Brother and Carlos Marcovich's charming semidocumentary portrait of a young girl, Who the Hell Is Juliette? From New Yorker, Carlos Saura's mesmerizing performance film Flamenco. From Disney/Touchstone, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, directed by Stuart Gordon, written by Ray Bradbury and starring Joe Mantegna and Edward James Olmos.
