Rejected by the 1963 New York Film Festival on the grounds it wasn’t a "real film," Point of Order! is a carefully edited compilation of television broadcasts of the famous Army-McCarthy hearings from the Spring of 1954, when McCarthy’s committee was providing a Senate sub-committee with evidence of Communist infiltration of the army. The film begins with a lengthy investigation into Army Private G. David Schine, a one-time McCarthy committee counsel who was drafted into the Army before the hearings. McCarthy and his chief counsel Roy Cohn charged the Army with holding Schine hostage to delay the investigations of the McCarthy committee, and the Army counter-charged that McCarthy had pulled strings to get Schine outrageous privileges. McCarthy spars with Secretary of Army Robert Stevens and tries – effectively – to make the Army look like it’s wasting everyone’s time while forever invoking the name of the American Public.

There’s an amazing and funny exchange between Cohn and the Army’s special counsel Joseph Welch involving a cropped photograph submitted to the Senate by Cohn showing Schine and Stevens together; a third man has been cropped from the photo, making the Schine/Stevens confab seem more personal than it was. When an executive order from President Eisenhower arrives instructing Army officials to refrain from testifying, McCarthy and Cohn get tough. They submit a purported letter from J. Edgar Hoover to the Army that names alleged communists, but when the letter is immediately discounted by Hoover’s men and the Attorney General, McCarthy sees a conspiracy by the treasonous Eisenhower.

When Cohn gives the actual number of communists in the defense department as 130, Welch sarcastically suggests that Cohn himself get all the commies out of town before sundown, enraging McCarthy. Retaliating in the most vicious, personal fashion possible he outs a former member of Welch’s legal team, Fred Fisher, as being affiliated with the communist legal group, the Lawyer’s Guild. Welch explains calmly that when he found out Fisher’s past he was immediately dismissed from his service, but the harm McCarthy has done to the young man’s life is perhaps irreparable. McCarthy nevertheless insists on burying Fisher, and Welch is outraged and shocked. "Have you no sense of decency?" Welch asks McCarthy, who still insists he’s acting in only the best interest of the public. Watching this exchange between Welch and McCarthy is devastating, and the blood runs cold at McCarthy’s unrelenting attack on Fisher; you can see he’s using what he thinks is a smoking gun, but it’s like watching a man start to drown when no sane person would throw him a life saver.

McCarthy gets into a shouting match with Missouri senator Stuart Symington, who tells McCarthy his files have been sloppily handled by his staff and calls a recess. McCarthy goes ballistic on Symington as everyone gets up to leave. "You can run away if you like Stu!" McCarthy yells. This is mind bending stuff and just as thrilling as any fiction – the characters just as interesting and the situation just as compelling. There’s even the homespun folksy lawyer (Welch) versus the Bad Guy in black (McCarthy) and his deputy (Cohn, just as fascinating as McCarthy).

But by the time McCarthy has basically called Eisenhower a traitor and has alleged that the atomic and hydrogen bomb plants, as well as a good deal of the C.I.A., are composed of communists, it’s hard not to think of Sterling Hayden’s General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove. When McCarthy alleges "communist infiltration" of the government, he seems just as irrational. Point of Order! remains a singularly compelling documentary over 35 years after its 1963 release.

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Nick Burton lives in Newport Beach, California. His fiction has appeared in many small press and web publications, including: Chronicles Of Fiction, Pauper, and of course Pif.