AllMovie

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.