Emile de Antonio's film record of the 36-day inquisitorial spectacle known as the Army-McCarthy hearings is an impressive document of '50s Cold War paranoia. Moreover, it is important for marking the emergence of television as political theater, and the American society as a television society. De Antonio (whose films include In the Year of the Pig, Millhouse, Painters Painting, etc.) and Daniel Talbot assembled highlights of 188 hours of TV kinescopes (found “all jumbled up, confused and forgotten” in a CBS New Jersey warehouse) to make “an organically contained...self-explanatory political statement,” in which Joseph McCarthy emerges as chief victim of the monster he helped create.
“The film is not an attack on McCarthy. The film is an attack on the American government...and the only people who saw that were a few Marxists. The good bourgeois critics loved the film and made it successful.” --De Antonio, interviewed in Film Quarterly