My Son John Blu-ray Review
Is that the Communist Manifesto in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, August 19, 2012
The so-called "Red Scare" reached out and touched my family in ways that colored two generations of interrelationships
in sometimes unexpected ways. As I've mentioned in a couple of other reviews, my late father was a much decorated
U.S. Army General whose exploits in World War II were covered by such famed war correspondents as A.J. Liebling,
featured both in books and in several issues of
The New Yorker during wartime. Both of my father's younger
brothers, however, tended to be more on the "leftist" side of the political spectrum, and one of those brothers was in
fact a card carrying American Communist, a rabble rousing union organizer who ended up fighting with the largely
Communist Abraham Lincoln Brigade against the fascist forces of Franco during the Spanish Civil War. This particular
Uncle was taken captive as a prisoner of war in Spain, ultimately released when my father was able to get a United
States Senator to work some private diplomacy on my Uncle's behalf, and while my Uncle's actual Communist affiliations
fell by the wayside after World War II, he continued to work on a variety of left leaning causes, ultimately leading to him
being called before the Dies Committee during the height of the Red Scare. Almost a decade later, my
other
Uncle was arrested for supposedly being a Soviet spy (a trumped up accusation), right at the height of the Cold War
and Berlin Wall crisis, and one
of the most salient pieces of "evidence" lobbied against him was that his older brother had been such an infamous
American Communist in the 1930s. Needless to say, this put a chink in my father's military armor, and he was forced to
give private testimony before a closed door Senate hearing that he was in no way affiliated with "Red" issues. Our
phones were tapped, my elder sisters were followed to and from school by the FBI (lest any "agents" attempt to pass
information to them, it was surmised), and our entire family dynamic was seriously upended due to the publicity
surrounding the spy case (Walter Winchell described it as the biggest spy scandal since Alger Hiss). And so the
unabashedly right leaning efforts of films like
My Son John always strike me with a profound sense of irony and
even dare I say a certain degree of disgust.
My Son John has become one of the most infamous cinematic
screeds of its era, a so called "dramatized documentary" look at the evils of Communism which may in fact highlight
more about xenophobic and chauvinistic (in the original sense of that word) attitudes of Americans circa the early 1950s
than it reveals any inherent problems with a competing ideological system.
Director Leo McCarey is probably best remembered for two somewhat similar films, as well as an "odd duck" third item.
The two linked films are the sweetly saccharine, overtly religious
Going My Way and
The Bells of St.
Mary's,
while the third film is McCarey's big swan song as a top tier director,
An Affair to Remember. McCarey's
oeuvre is filled with any number of classics however, films as varied as
Duck Soup and
The Awful
Truth, as well as fascinating curios like
Make Way for Tomorrow. But McCarey had become something of a
right
wing zealot by the time the early fifties rolled around, and
My Son John was meant to be his filmic call to arms
about the perceived Communist menace. The film is decidedly weird, even surreal, some of which can be attributed to
the
unexpected death of co-star Robert Walker (the John of the film's title), which necessitated almost
Plan 9 From
Outer
Space-esque editing and use of doubles to cover Walker's absence, a la the "genius" moves of Ed Wood
vis a
vis Bela Lugosi in Wood's
magnum opus.
Even without the sudden "departure" of Walker, however,
My Son John certainly belongs among the oddest
films ever helmed (and co-written, no less) by a major American director. Helen Hayes and Dean Jagger play the middle
aged Jefferson parents, whose two strangely blonde and almost Aryan youth looking sons (one of whom is played by a
very young Richard Jaeckel) are leaving to fight in Korea as the film starts. The Jefferson's third son, John, is absent
from the goodbye dinner, and one can tell that there is a certain degree of dysfunction with regard to this "intellectual"
progeny. When Walker shows up a week later (looking swarthy and brown haired—did Mrs. Jefferson sleep around?),
tensions are immediately increased, especially between Mr. Jefferson and his errant boy. Soon a genial but obviously
deadly serious FBI agent (Van Heflin) shows up, poking his nose around the Jefferson's business, and things take a
provocative turn.
It soon becomes apparent that John, college educated and all, has indeed fallen under the evidently hypnotic spell of
Communism, sending his American Legion attending father and his well meaning but addle-pated mother off the
emotional deep end. The film is an unintentional laugh riot at times, with such throwaway lines as "See you in the
bomb shelter" or Mrs. Jefferson's comment about the local priest's old stove being so beat up they had to pay someone
to "throw it in the ravine" provoking giggles that immediately undercut the tone of reverent hysteria that McCarey so
deeply wants to convey. This is a film where the Bible is linked to Mom and apple pie (literally) and is later used as an
actual weapon when Pa Jefferson gets a bit out of sorts. Modern day jaws will probably drop agape throughout large
swaths of this film, so patently melodramatic is the general tenor of the Jefferson family dynamic.
It's fascinating to contrast
My Son John with
The Stranger, a decidedly more subtle (and hence much
more effective) film which explores many of the same issues.
The Stranger plays like a kind of darker analog to
Hitchcock's
Shadow of a Doubt, where the main villain's "sin" is his political persuasion rather than any
murderous tendencies, and where his very villainy is only slowly brought to light over the course of the film.
The
Stranger is a wonderfully wrought exercise in people slowly becoming aware of a
menace existing in their bucolic little town, and it's anchored by a frighteningly effective performance by Orson Welles
where his villainy is palpable but never hyperbolic. In
My Son John, however, Walker actually is in many ways
more sympathetic than his straight arrow parents: he's certainly smarter, more articulate, funnier and
seemingly more aware about the "grays" in a supposedly black and white world. Mr. Jefferson comes off as someone
(to paraphrase the film itself) addicted to bromides, a sort of early fifties Glenn Beck insisting that we face certain doom
and gloom
should those evil Commies take over. Mrs. Jefferson is left to look on helplessly, worrying about whether she should
take the tranquilizers the local doctor has kindly dropped off for her to make sure she won't suddenly go crazy.
Any film which surnames its family Jefferson and then attempts to explore the dialectic between a "free" people and an
"enslaved" one is obviously not trying to win any arguments via subliminal suggestion. What's so very, very odd about
My Son John is how weirdly dissociative it is in the early going, a "separate" quality which then veers awfully
close to Grand Guignol as the film stumbles toward its cobbled together climax (without spoiling too much, eagle eyed
viewers will no doubt recognize certain inserts of Walker culled from
Strangers on a Train). Another interesting
thing about this film, at least within the context of an early fifties drama (melodrama?), is its quasi-improvisatory feeling.
Watch Hayes' bizarre little mannerisms throughout the film, especially when she's pretending to be crazy in a
supposedly light hearted moment (yes, there's nothing like feigned schizophrenia to put everyone in a party mood).
Later, in the first extended scene between Hayes and Heflin, both actors seem to be kind of stumbling through their
dialogue, as if they're making it up as they go along. The film also has numerous moments of "stepped on" interaction
between the actors, something that might indicate first takes had to be utilized since there just wasn't enough
coverage after Walker's untimely demise.
This is certainly among the most unusual offerings yet from Olive Films, a label which seems intent on uncovering all
sorts of "treasures" that most aficionados would probably never have expected to see released at all, let alone in high
definition.
My Son John isn't exactly camp—it's far too self-important and actually kind of scarily ardent for that—
but it is an unbelievably captivating film nonetheless, probably for all the wrong reasons. The film wanted to warn
sanguine Americans about the Red Menace supposedly breathing down our collective necks, but instead it highlighted
an almost hysterical (in both senses of the word) sensibility on the part of ultra-right leaning types who were so intent
on dealing with a perceived external threat they couldn't recognize their own failings and paranoia. For a film so
wrapped up in God and the Bible, it's ironic that a famous verse from the Gospel of Matthew didn't occur to McCarey:
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote
out of thy brother's eye.