Tail Gunner Joe

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".

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.

This is a great made for TV film, sporting a deep bench of wonderful actors. This is the kind of made for TV stuff above budget and vision of the major networks now. However, is this movie accurate history? Well, very few honest intellectuals could defend Joe McCarthy unless maybe after several big gulps of Jack Daniels. That said, a few facts? HUAAC was a House organ, not directly tied to the Senate in any way, and McCarthy was a Senator. Point being, there were lots of witch hunters back then. For purpose of drama, both this film and history have settled on McCarthy as the sole and thorough bad guy.

McCarthy directly hurt very few lives. He did amplify a current of nervousness already running through America, and this spawned many imitators. These Monkey-seers Monkey-doers were even more hurtful than Joe, by sheer force of numbers alone.

To honest intellectuals, it seems obvious Joe McCarthy couldn't catch a cold at the North Pole. As "The Haunted Wood" (Allen Weinstein) reveals, from briefly opened Soviet archives, there were plenty faithful Communist spies operating in the US. McCarthy...Keystone Cop versus Houdini basically.

If one can understand there were dangerous Communist spies working hard in the US in the early 1950's, but they weren't in Hollywood, they were in Washington. If one can understand early 50's Red Scare was kind of hangover from VE & VJ day, following Soviet detonation of A-bomb. If one can understand Joe McCarthy was not evil genius of persecuting many good folk who just held harmless unpopular views (personally, I wouldn't trust Joe McCarthy to mow my lawn) but only somebody who blew on something already smoldering? Then by all means watch this movie and enjoy it. It is well made with some wonderful actors. But it ain't accurate history.

Tail Gunner Joe is now available on You Tube 2h 43min.

It is a source of continual amazement to me that, if a person lives long enough, the opposite of Shakespeare's saying proves true. The bard said something like "The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones." The opposite is all too often true. This appears to be the case with McCarthy. The longer he is dead, the more people forget about what a truly vile maggot he was. This movie does a reasonably good job of portraying McCarthy as he was and not as the new bunch of neo-conservatives want him to have been. His reckless disregard for the truth (often under the guise of looking for the truth) made him the functional equivalent of a twentieth century inquisitor. It also points out how Eisenhower stood by and did absolutely nothing to curb McCarthy. Of course, Eisenhower did virtually nothing for eight years, so this was nothing new...