The film uses selections from the hearings to show the overall development of the trial, beginning with introductions from several main participants, such as Joseph N. Welch and McCarthy.
[4] Each participant is shown in a still image with a brief audio recording, except for McCarthy, who is introduced with longer footage of a speech he made during the hearings.
The sequence includes a frequently quoted exchange from the hearings: Welch asks McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?
Symington returns to the microphone and says: "Apparently every time anybody says anything against anybody working for Senator McCarthy, he is declaring them and accusing them of being Communists!"
McCarthy continues his passionate but repetitious defense of his staff and his attack on Symington, speaking to an increasingly empty chamber.
De Antonio and Talbot thought a film about the Army–McCarthy hearings could be successful at Henry Rosenberg's New Yorker Theater.
[7] Talbot initially asked Orson Welles, then Irving Lerner to direct the film, but neither man agreed to do so.
Their plan was to remove any narration, music, or added scenes and create a documentary using only the footage from the kinescopes of the hearings.
[5] De Antonio said that his two main decisions with regard to making the film were "only footage from the actual hearings would be used" and "no preaching.
In 1968 it was recut and shown on television, with an added introduction by Paul Newman, to provide context for audiences unfamiliar with the Army–McCarthy hearings.
[10] In 1986, MPI Home Video released an abridged 49-minute version (with the Newman Introduction) under the title McCarthy, Death of a Witch Hunter: a Film of the Era of Senator Joseph R.
Judith Crist wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that "the producers have excerpted a superdocumentary instead of creating one of their own.