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my understanding was that that particular moment WAS a turning point in McCarthy's career. and certainly the alcohol and heroin weren't doing him a whole lot of good. how long did he live after those hearings? I'm pretty sure it wasn't more than a couple of years, during which he was no longer any sort of force to be reckoned with.

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McCarthy's liver gave out in 1948, just under three years after the end of the hearings. Old Joseph Welch went on to have a small role as the judge in the film "Anatomy of a Murder" based on a Robert Travers book about an actual murder that occurred in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where I lived and went to college for a year when classes were held at the Kincheloe AF Base.

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It was 1958.

Anatomy of a Murder was my screenwriting mentor's (Wendell Mayes) first Oscar nomination (and then he won one for "the Poseidon Adventure" - go figure)

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go figure indeed. sometimes, Oscars are given for an undeserving picture (or performer or whatever) to compensate for a previously undeserved loss.

oddly enough, this past year the movies and performers that won were pretty much the ones that should have won, which has become increasingly rare.

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you mean '58. and the movie was a great favorite of mine when it came out and remains one I keep returning to. the northernmost part of Michigan I've spent time in is Charlevoix/Petoskey. Lake Michigan was fucking COLD.

the score is the best one of the several movies Duke Ellington scored. the Criterion Edition has some great extra stuff and a bee-you-tee-full restoration.

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It may have been a turning point in the hearings, and in McCarthy's career (which may have gone to hell without it), but McCarthyism *still* isn't dead. It's still a big reason why we can't have nice things, like universal health care, or a tax system that doesn't benefit the wealthy, and it helps explain why anyone who advocates for these things is called "far left" -- a loose transition of "commie pinko traitor to the white American way."

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