My Son John

In viewing My Son John you have to keep a few things in mind. First Leo McCarey directed and wrote the film. Second Leo McCarey was a staunch anti-Communist and part of Hollywood's right wing caucus. Third Leo McCarey was also a devout and practicing Catholic. Fourth Leo McCarey was also one of Hollywood's bigger alcoholics. Put all that together and I think you've got the answer to how My Son John was created.

It's interesting to speculate how My Son John would have turned out if Robert Walker had lived to complete the film. Putting the patchwork ending on the film that he was forced to do left a lot of plot holes. For one thing, I'm not sure exactly why the FBI in the person of Van Heflin was on to Walker. He's a government bureaucrat, a high level one, but we never really learn what he did as a job and what he might have been doing for the Communists.

What Walker is is the oldest son of Dean Jagger and Helen Hayes as a representative a group of middle Americans as you can get. He's quite a bit older than his brothers and made a good academic record and now is a big success in Washington. His two jock younger brothers, Richard Jaeckel and James Young are about to go to war in Korea and he's back home for the family sendoff. You know right away something's amiss when he shows up late, not really having the heart to wish his brothers well in fighting against the Reds in Korea.

How do you spot a Communist? Well if you're Leo McCarey you've got to dislike the Catholic Church you've been brought up in. That's what Walker does, he makes snide remarks about the church and other wholesome American institutions. Man's got to be a subversive as his parents come to realize. Remember Pius XII was Pope at the time and he was a staunch anti-Communist. This is where McCarey's Catholicism comes into play.

How incredibly naive. If Walker were really an effective spy he'd be the loudest amen shouter in church, make the most obviously big contributions in the collection plate etc. to keep his cover.

Frank McHugh reprises his role from Going My Way as Father O'Dowd who apparently has left the mean streets of Hell's Kitchen New York and Barry Fitzgerald and now is pastoring out in the red states. Since McCarey also wrote and directed Going My Way and created McHugh's character he certainly could do what he wanted with him. But for the life of me I can't figure out why McHugh adopted a brogue for this film when he had none in Going My Way.

When Leo McCarey was creating some of the best screen comedy like The Awful Truth and Once Upon A Honeymoon, there were few his peer and none better. But he was out of his league in dealing with political material. And if you're wondering about how this might have turned out if Walker had lived, take a look at McCarey's last film, Satan Never Sleeps. Also an anti-Communist film it makes My Son John look like Citizen Kane.

Somewhat paranoiac drama looking at the perceived communist threat in the 40s and 50s. Overwrought in both direction and performance-Helen Hayes in particular seems on the very verge throughout the film. Walker died suddenly during the making of the film and his performance was completed by cobbling together outtakes from Strangers on a Train and the use of a stand-in in some scenes, its easy to pick out most of the these and it cast an odd melancholy pall over the picture. More of an interesting artifact of a troubled time in US history than a good example of film making. McCarey could be an exceptional director who made many fine films and possessed a few Oscars but he is decidedly off his game here. A strange experience.

In the beginning we see all of the Jeffersons -sans the titular John - going to church in their small town, getting ready to send their two sons off to Korea. These are the good sons, the literally blue eyed blonde haired sons in their uniforms going off to war, with the church symbolically behind them as the priest is the one to drive them off to join up with their regiments. Hey. Have I just wandered into a Nazi propaganda film, because so far it sure seems like it! Didn't Sam Goldwyn make "The North Star" just nine years before telling us how great and friendly those Russians were? And that Stalin, he was just a big lovable father figure...in 1943 that is.

John is given a big build up before he even physically enters the scene. He is a big intellect. His brothers were the football players, he was the student. Dad is suspicious of John and thinks he looks down on them. Mom is still seeing him as a little boy, and sometimes it gets downright creepy. You almost feel like if John died and she lived we'd have the reverse of Hitchcock's "Psycho" playing out as John would be the stuffed one sitting in a rocker. John is also treated as some sort of supernatural threat that only mother love and the Catholic church can defeat. The truth unfolds as though the son has been found out to be a vampire, one of the walking dead. Rosaries and crosses and talk of God thus repel him.

There also seemed to be quite a bit of Bruno ("Strangers on a Train") in John Jefferson, especially with cigarette in hand, conversing with dear old Mom: Oh you know how father is, etc. He just preferred a gray flannel suit to a silk dressing gown, and communism to homosexuality. Besides the dark shadow of Marxism-Leninism hovering over the Jefferson household, there is the dark shadow of mom's menopause. Mother Jefferson does seem very subject to mood swings, even before she starts to suspect John's secret. That's why the doctor gave her those three times a day pills. I think Helen Hayes played this role very well, with just the right tone of confused mother love, and a little bit of pixilation. But maybe it would have been better if her two All-American sons had actually sent her back an opium pipe from their government-sponsored trip to Korea rather than a kimono, and the necessary contents to fill it. Mom could have mellowed out a bit. Who sends their mom a kimono anyways?

Leaving aside the Communist element, this film is similar to ones like All My Sons and others of the deep, dark, family secret genre. Usually it's the old man who is hiding something from his cheerily normal family. This time it's the son who has the secret. That sets up all those claustrophobic, dark, gloomy scenes between the three in their somewhat spooky house. And while it's overlong and overwrought, that's the saving grace of this film. There's a certain pedestrian reality to this aspect of the movie that's separate from all the Red Scare guff. I was hoping John would come through with a few more anti-clerical shafts at the expense of the priest, but you can't have everything.

If you want to see a similar film from the same era, see John Wayne's "Big Jim McLain". That one has a lot more action, Wayne style, but still makes the same basic claim. Loyal all-American guys and gals are physically attractive and good at sports and genuinely well liked. The ones that are likely to be seduced by Communism lack athletic ability and may be overly intellectual, making them prime targets for being philosophically enslaved by their Soviet masters. However, in trying to fight the Soviet menace, the authorities use tactics similar to those they say that they are fighting, such as faking a car accident, impersonating Joe average, and then smooth talking their way into the home of the unknowing parents so they can get them talking and maybe get some clues, which FBI agent Van Heflin does. Yet somehow, being Heflin after all, he manages to remain charming throughout.

This had to have been an A-list production for Paramount, because of the very talented cast. You have Academy award winning Helen Hayes and Van Heflin, Dean Jagger as John's father playing it a bit over the top, and finally Frank McHugh in a more serious role than I was accustomed to seeing him in, but still with a touch of that comic wit he displayed over at Warner Brothers in the 30'sand 40's. I'd recommend it because the mass hysteria of the red scares may be 65 years in the past, but this film gives us a good record of how it affected the film industry. I'm giving a 6/10 more for historical value and being a snapshot in time.

This was on Turner Classic Movies about six years ago, just once. Other than buying the rather pricey DVD, the only other way I know to see it is Amazon Prime, where it is free per view, which is how I saw it today.

Much maligned in its day as one of Hollywood's much too fervent attempts at atonement to the HUAC and McCarthy for having once hired so many communists, this slick Paramount picture made in 1952 remains a social document that reveals the right-wing views some members of the film community held during those dark days. It glorifies an idealized small-town family. Dad (Dean Jagger) is a solid hard-working citizen, a Legioner who finds time to toss around a football with his two blonde athletic sons about to fight the good war in Korea; he's a man who goes to church every Sunday. The flaw in the perfect unit is mother--who else?-- and her curse of too much Mommy love; Helen Hayes, for some reason, too obviously dotes on the son (Robert Walker) who doesn't play football, doesn't go to church, and prefers the company of college professors, yes professors, to his own family. He is, horror of horrors, a practicing self-admitted intellectual.

Needless to say, we eventually learn that any spoiled child brought up this way cannot be up to good. Despite this silly propogandist view of the true values of decent American life, the film is very well directed by the great Leo McCarey, excellently acted by all the leading players. Robert Walker, in his last film, is particularly effective as the non-athletic son with heretic (read unAmerican) views. If the film had been made a decade or so later, his secret would have been that he was gay, but as this is 1952, the sin is political.

In its way, this film is a historical document (albeit a misguided one), and certainly a product of its time. Made at the height of the infamous red scare, "My Son John" is so fervent in its anti-Communist message that it becomes somewhat fascinating as a piece of social history.The film has become famous (or perhaps more correctly notorious) as propaganda; despite the sometimes; overwrought script, the film is not without a talented cast. The great theatrical actress Helen Hayes, in one of her relatively rare movie appearances, is really very good as the mother, as is Dean Jagger as the father, and Robert Walker is fine as the son who is the object of his parent's suspicions. (Walker actually died before filming was finished, so some scenes were shot with a double or prepared with footage from Walker's earlier film "Strangers On A Train", or re-written to exclude Walker's character or requiring his presence.)

In response to another reviewer, who wondered who had actually seen this film - I saw it a couple of times on Canadian television, once in the 1970's, and the last time in December, 1990. To my knowledge, it hasn't been shown on Canadian TV (at least in my viewing area) since that time.

Update: The film was released on DVD and blu-ray in 2015.