CHARGE AND COUNTERCHARGE

Charge and Countercharge depicts the rise and fall of Joseph R. McCarthy, the Junior Senator from Wisconsin whose name became a household word in the '50s and coined a term for a political attitude that is still with us today. Beginning with a montage of events that led to the Cold War, this film focuses on the famous Army-McCarthy hearings which were televised in the Spring of 1954.

A film by Emile de Antonio
1969, 43 minutes
Purchase: $99.95 Classroom Rental: $60

* Outstanding Nonprint Material, Choice (American Library Association)
"...excellent...Highly recommended for undergraduate and graduate students of U.S. history, political science, and the mass media."--Choice (American Library Association)

"...accurate in its presentation of information and balanced in its positions...quite useful to college students of political science."--Educational Technology

Background Information on Charge and Countercharge
This short documentary is part of the odd progeny of Point of Order. A half-dozen derivative films - and two LP records - were made as de Antonio (and Dan Talbot) "repurposed" their original 1963 film. The first iteration was Point of Order!(1964), an LP from Columbia Masterworks, with Eric Sevareid of CBS News narrating. In 1968, de Antonio issued his own LP on Folkways Records. That same year he produced the abridgement called Charge and Countercharge

This film featured voice-over narration by de Antonio. But far from being simply a reduction of the 1963 film, it introduces a considerable amount of archival footage not seen in the single-source kinescopes of Point of Order Lynzee Klingman, a newcomer, edited the material, while also doing the laudable cutting on In the Year of the Pig (She then became an Oscar-winning Hollywood editor, one of the most sought after of the last thirty years.)

ABC News and Australian television also broadcast their own shortened versions of Point, with different narrators. Finally, Paul Newman did a short on-camera introduction in the late 1970s, which was added to most subsequent editions. (from the Anthology Film Archives catalog, on the occasion of the Emile de Antonio retrospective)

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