My Son John


My Son John is a 1952 American drama film directed by Leo McCarey, starring Robert Walker as a suspected Communist spy.
The strongly anti-Communist film, produced during the height of McCarthyism, received an Oscar nomination for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story. The nomination was later viewed as a possible attempt by the motion picture industry to signal its loyalty to the anti-Communist campaign then underway.

Plot summary

In uniform, Chuck and Ben Jefferson, strapping blonds who played high school football, attend Sunday Mass with their parents before leaving for army service in Korea. Their older brother, John sends regrets that he can not join their farewell dinner because of his work for the federal government in Washington.
A week later, John visits his parents, his devoutly Catholic mother Lucille and American Legionnaire father Dan. In conversation with them and their parish priest, John uses humor to make provocative statements and his attitude is resented. He spends hours with one of his college professors leaving his parents feeling short-changed. John makes sarcastic remarks about the Legion and his father questions his loyalty. After a visit from the FBI, John assures his mother of his loyalty by swearing on her Bible, but John and his father argue. His mother tells John to "think with your heart, not your head". When John leaves a key behind when he returns to his job in Washington, D.C., his mother, while trying to return the key to him, learns it is for the apartment of a female spy. Mother enters the apartment and confronts John, who confesses to having an affair. She refuses to accept his assurances of loyalty and begs him to confess, and declares that he deserves to be punished. The FBI agent tells him he should "use whatever free will you have. Give up. Name names." John escapes, repents his actions, and decides to turn himself in, but is killed by Communist agents before he can do so. The FBI finds his tape-recorded confession and play it at his college's commencement exercises.

Cast

The film was based on an idea by Leo McCarey, and developed into a script by John Lee Mahin.
Paramount built interest in the project by reporting the casting of each role, beginning with the news in December 1950 that Helen Hayes was considering it for her return to motion pictures after more than 15 years away from the film industry.
The details of the story were kept secret while it was first described in one news report as "a contemporary drama about the relationship between a mother and son, described by McCarey as 'highly emotional but with much humor'".
Despite McCarey's "close-mouthed silence" for two months and a public warning to Hayes not to discuss the plot, it was reported that "word has gotten around Hollywood with the authority such wisps of information always have that the son... is a traitor to his country–an agent of Communist espionage." Daily Variety reported that Hayes, mirroring certain current events, would shoot her son in the film and be tried for his murder.
Hayes called it "a natural, human part" where she didn't have to worry about her appearance.
In February 1951 Robert Walker was borrowed from MGM to play the title role. The same month Dean Jagger signed. Hedda Hopper reported the script "has gotten raves from everyone who's read it."
Van Heflin signed in April 1951.
Ten days into shooting, the plot's unknown elements continued to garner press coverage. McCarey denied it was the Alger Hiss story and said it had a "happy ending". He offered this:
Hayes denied that the film's "message" attracted her to the project: "I just like the character and the story. I am deadly set against messages as the prime factor for taking a part. But I do feel the picture is a very exciting comment on a certain phase of our living today".
It was the last film role of Robert Walker. It was reported that he died less than a week after completing work on the film, though in fact McCarey had to alter the film's ending because of Walker's unfilmed sequences and insert a shot of Walker from Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train.
Filming took place in Washington, D.C., Manassas, Virginia, and Hollywood.

Reception

The picture was not a success at the box office. It grossed under $1 million and failed to make the list of the Top Ninety pictures of the year as compiled by Variety.
Bosley Crowther wrote in his review for The New York Times that the film represented its time perfectly in that it "corresponds with the present public ferment of angry resentment and fear", that it is "a picture so strongly dedicated to the purpose of the American anti-Communist purge that it seethes with the sort of emotionalism and illogic that is characteristic of so much thinking these days". He wrote that allowing a mother to condemn her son based on flimsy evidence shows the film's "hot emotional nature" and that its endorsement of bigotry and argument for religious conformity would "cause a thoughtful person to feel a shudder of apprehension". While praising all the actors, he regretted the film's "snide anti-intellectual stance".
Other critics underscored the cultural attitudes behind the film's politics. In the New York Herald Tribune, Ogden Reid, later a Congressman, wrote: "McCarey's picture of how America ought to be is so frightening, so speciously argued, so full of warnings against an intelligent solution to the problem that it boomerangs upon its own cause."
The New Yorker said the film advised the public to "cut out thinking, obey their superiors blindly, regard all political suspects as guilty without trial, revel in joy through strength, and pay more attention to football".
Others have appreciated that the film locates the ideological conflict within a complex set of family relations, with father and son competing for the same woman's affection, but noted that John is not just intellectual, but "an unathletic, sexually ambiguous intellectual", both "sullen" and "slick". Others have interpreted John's character as homosexual.
In response to negative reviews from the New York critics, the Catholic Press Institute unanimously endorsed a resolution praising it and Senator Karl Mundt entered a statement into the Congressional Record calling it "undoubtedly the greatest and most stirring pro-American motion picture of the last decade.... It should be seen by the people of every American home." McCarey told the magazine Motion Picture that he felt mistreated and hurt.
In April 1952, just after the film opened, Bosley Crowther noted that My Son John provided an ironic contrast to all the public outcry about Communist subversion in the film industry on the part of the American Legion and the Catholic War Veterans. He wrote:
A month after the film opened, the Catholic Press Association awarded McCarey its 1952 Literary Prize for "exemplification of Christian, Catholic principles", citing his work on My Son John and other films.
In 1998, Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader included the film in his unranked list of the best American films not included on the AFI Top 100.

Reputation and legacy

, writing about a festival of blacklist-era films in 1992, characterized My Son John as "hysterical", "the anti-Communist movie to end all anti-Communist movies".
An assessment of McCarey's extraordinary sympathy for his characters found that the director had lost that feeling by the 1950s, or at least failed to have succeeded in maintaining it consistently. In My Son John, wrote Stuart Klawans for The New York Times in 2002, "gentleness itself had become a sin". In his view, McCarey's "exquisitely sensitive" handling of the mother-son relationship in the first part of the film was undercut by Myles Connolly, a screenwriter known for writing many a "bullying speech" for Frank Capra. Klawans hears Connolly's tone in the film's finale, a commencement address warning the young against liberalism.
J. Hoberman noted the film's dual personality, writing that it "aspires to the warmth of a domestic comedy while remaining tendentious to the core, relentlessly unfunny and starkly melodramatic".