mike robson A hard to find film which coasts on the still pervasive mythology of Senator Joe McCarthy as a political demon king. Boyle (as Joe) gives a compelling but historically inaccurate portrayal of the Wisconsin Senator, the caricature McCarthy many take as the real one. Meredith, as wily Army lawyer Joseph Welch, who outsmarted McCarthy at the Army hearings in 1954, is very good, as always.In fact, McCarthy and Cohn were quite right in worrying about the appalling security situation in the Army, and the 1954 Army hearings became enmeshed in the smokescreen used by the Army to deflect the investigation away from their security failings, which the committee were investigating, by counter-charging that McCarthy and Cohn were trying to get favours for their staffer, David Schine, whilst in the service.The film is self satisfied agenda driven polemic, based in the pervasive myths which have passed for the truth with many people for decades-that the "red scare" was essentially phony and McCarthy, HUAC etc were always blasting away at the wrong targets, being no more than lying, career ruining publicity hounds, who were trampling over the constitutional rights of startled innocent liberals, who were accused of being security risks/communists.People who know little about the matter still feel confident in repeating misinformation on McCarthy and the "red scare" to this day-Clooney's Murrow hagiography is an example. The misinformation is pervasive, no wonder people have swallowed it. A recent obit of Budd Schulberg in the serious left wing UK newspaper "The Guardian" headlined that the Hollywood writer "named names" "to McCarthy"- perpetuating the lie that McCarthy "investigated" Hollywood as head of HUAC-the truth being that McCarthy was never even a member of HUAC and he had little interest in the politics of Hollywood types-his investigations were confined almost exclusively to arms of the US government.The mythology about the "red scare" being baseless is now completely exploded by recently opened Soviet and US government documents, if anything McCarthy and co underestimated the sheer scale of Soviet and fellow traveller infiltration in the US, but decades of public misinformation about this period will be hard to correct.One day maybe some really brave Hollywood soul will make a movie telling the truth about how many American men and women clandestinely aided the mass murderer Stalin, and worked to impose his vicious system of government on the western world, giving an accurate account maybe of Joe McCarthy's career-but I won't hold my breath. Till then, we have this mythical, drunken lying scoundrel of popular imagination so familiar in the media...."Tail gunner Joe".

jtpaladin This movie is a horrible distortion of lies and exaggerations that were put together by the most shameless lunatics to ever work on a TV movie. The story is wrong and a complete lie. There is nothing in this movie that accurately portrays Senator McCarthy. It's just a horrible scam and it amazes me that anyone associated with this production ever got another job in the industry. The marxist-leninists who wrote this trash did so in order to attack a man who has been vindicated by history and their fear that anyone would dare to destroy communism. Unfortunately for these communist nut jobs, Ronald Reagan took over where McCarthy left off and they couldn't stop him, thus the end of the Soviet Union and its' cohorts.Never, ever watch this film if you're looking for truth regarding Sen. McCarthy. Read Ann Coulter's book, "Treason" for a better look at the truth about Sen. McCarthy.It will also help if you read about what really happened to Senator McCarthy by reading http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1996/vo12no18/vo12no18_mccarthy.htm

dtucker86 Peter Boyle is a truly amazing character actor! He is perhaps best known for his role on the popular sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. He has an amazing body of work to his credit. He first became a star in 1970 when he played a hardhat bigot in the sleeper hit Joe and then in 1974 he gave a funny and yet at the same time rather touching performance in Mel Brook's Young Frankenstein. Three years after that, he starred in this television film as one of the most controversial political figures of the twentieth century, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. There are certain figures in our American culture, that defy definition or description. You could read every article and headline and book about them and they would remain a puzzling enigma and McCarthy was certainly one of these. Was he a true American patriot who just got carried away in his own crusade? or a selfish and brutal demagogue who only cared about the headlines that his wild charges made and got him re-elected to the Senate? McCarthyism became a byword of our culture, it began as a speech that this man made in my homestate of Wheeling, West Virginia when he waved that infamous piece of paper above his head and said that he had in his hand a list of 205 persons who were members of the Communist party who were members of the State Department and it snowballed into a tornado that shook the very fiber and walls of Representative American Government. This movie, or rather I should say that writer of this film has no love for this man. It presents him as an unalloyed sleaze and an almost Shakespeare like villian. You almost expect Boyle to say "Now is the winter of our discontent...." I recently read a more balanced biography of Joe that shed him in a different light. Its true that he did bad things, but his good was presented as well. Maybe McCarthy's greatest tragedy was his own recklessness. His motto in life seemed to be. He who does not live dangerously, does not live at all. Boyle still did an amazing job and Burgess Meredith is wonderful as the lawyer who opposed him at the Army McCarthy hearings.

melkart The title says it all. "Tail Gunner Joe" was a tag given to the Senator which relied upon the ignorance of the public about World War II aircraft. The rear facing moving guns relied upon a latch that would prevent the rear gunner from shooting off the tail of the airplane by preventing the gun from firing when it pointed at the tail. When the Senator was practicing on the ground one day, he succeeded in shooting off the tail of the airplane. He couldn't have done that if the gun had been properly aligned. The gunnery officer responsible for that admitted, in public, before a camera, that he was responsible -- he had made the error, not the Senator. The fact that the film did not report that fact, shows how one-sided it is. This film was designed to do one thing, destroy the reputation of a complex person. A much better program was the PBS special done on him. He was a hard working, intelligent, ambitious politician who overcame extraordinary disadvantages to rise to extraordinary heights. He made some mistakes, some serious mistakes, but shooting the tail off an airplane was not one of them.The popularity of this film is due to the fact that the public likes simple stories, one=sided stories, so that they don't have to think.