The strange ironies of history aside, the star of the show is still the late Joe McCarthy — and what a performer he was! One can recall his jowly menace and five-o’clock shadow, but it is shocking to rediscover his nervous giggle and his showbiz personality. There was a strangely populist appeal working for McCarthy as the last apostle of direct democracy unsullied by all the confidential “arrangements” of the well born and well educated. When Ike plugged up his keyhole after throwing Stevens to the wolves outside the door, McCarthy was finished. Even the Trotskyists, who had toyed with the idea of using McCarthy as their golem against the Stalinists, were soon bored by Joe’s ludicrous inexactitude. Curiously, Joe’s medium was neither television nor radio, and he was hardly a Huey Long out on the stump. With succinctness as his forte and fear as his gospel, McCarthy may have been the first and last demagogue of the wire services.
—Village Voice, January 16, 1964
Andrew Sarris reviewing, Point of Order!, by Emil De Antonio and Daniel Talbot, from the book, Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 1955-1969
