The Red Scare Era of Hollywood is typically discussed in conjunction with the town’s entanglement with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and the ensuing blacklist that grew larger as their investigations went on. Hollywood’s darker secret is the string of anti-Communist propaganda films they produced in the late 1940s and early 1950s, which certainly helped to fan the flames that would engulf the Hollywood Ten and other innocents whose careers were reduced to ashes. Most of these films remain so obscure because of their mindless jingoism, flat performance, lifeless drama, and complete absence of aesthetic value, with titles like The Red Menace and I Married a Communist blatantly announcing the ideological instrument with which they will ceaselessly bludgeon their audience with.
Leo McCarey’s My Son John, on the other hand, is the kind of inspired and deranged film that could only come from a truly great filmmaker — whose Love Affair and Make Way for Tomorrow stand among the greatest Hollywood melodramas of the 1930s. McCarey was a distinctly emotional filmmaker who often employed improvisation on set and had a knack for exploring the often complex emotional lives of his many conflicted characters. These are qualities that make him particularly ill-suited to the purposes of propaganda, yet they are explicitly what add a deeply felt empathy and conflicted emotional and psychosexual turmoil to a film that could easily be redubbed My Son Was a Communist Spy.
That My Son John’s politics and moral finger-wagging are abominable (even to many people in 1952) should be taken as a given, but McCarey’s fully emotional appeal to our collective sense of duty to God and country offers a great deal of insight into not only the type of noxious conservatism that led to the Red Scare, but that of the Make America Great Again movements (the 1980s and 2010/2020s editions). One need only look at the film’s central family unit to see the imagined perfect American family, naturally named the Jeffersons — doting, loyal mother, Lucille (Helen Hayes), American Legion-loving vet dad, Dan (Dean Jagger), and two blond, muscle-bound former football stars and current soldiers (Richard Jaeckel & James Young) heading to Korea to protect the homeland.
On the surface, it’s as much corn-fed Americana as was served up by Leave it To Beaver later that decade, but the pernicious presence of the condescending academic, and seemingly asexual, son John (Robert Walker) reveal the cracks in this facade, rendering both mother and father with surprising nuance despite the rigidity (and loathsome nature) of their ideological beliefs. Critic Dave Kehr, for one, has deemed My Son John an “appalling masterpiece” as well as the “most wrenching right-wing film ever made,” and it’s the unlikely combination of McCarey’s vast skill as a purveyor of human emotion and his fervent anti-Communist beliefs (led by his gung-ho patriotic brand of Catholicism) that makes the film such a fascinating outlier in a sub-genre that has understandably been swept under the rug and left in the past where it belongs.
Indeed, McCarey’s attack on Communism involves no overarching logic or even a basis in fact. Rather, My Son John locates the paranoia of the times entirely within the family unit, complete with Oedipal underpinnings to guide the drama. Lucille, a “woman of a certain age” (ie, menopausal and thus, the film presumes, sexually inactive) is dogged in her infantilization of John, bemoaning how he’s changed since he left home for a college education (as in the Trump era, higher education is demonized and made the cause of any beliefs not staunchly conservative). In one particularly demented scene, Lucille reminisces about John when he was a child and, while sitting with him on his childhood bed gleefully regales him with a childhood favorite song, pretending to bounce a baby on her knee as she sings “Deedle Deedle dumpling, my son John.” It’s as if she wants him (and, it seems, America as a whole) to return to childhood, not only physically but mentally — all her nourishment, she says, comes from two books: her cookbook and the Bible.
Lucille’s excessive nurturing toward John is matched by Dan’s suspiciousness about the extent of his new belief system. After all, who but a Commie would make fun of a grown man breaking into patriotic fervor, singing about a desire to honor and fight for old Uncle Sam? But just as John’s sarcastic mocking of his mom’s sentimentality gradually causes her to psychologically come undone, so too does the more politically charged combat between John and his dad cause the latter to devolve into alcoholism and question his self-worth and effectiveness as a father. The fact that this familial breakdown is caused explicitly by John’s political beliefs — blanketly presented not only as an affront to God and America, but the American Family as a unit — is patently absurd. But it doesn’t change the fact that McCarey balances the unhinged political paranoia with gracefulness in presenting the pain of a family falling apart.
Hayes’ performance, in particular, walks the line between expressive and excessive, tipping into camp numerous times, but her wild emotional swings from hyperactive, smothering love to crushing disappointment as her suspicions about John repeatedly creep in, serve as the emotional anchor to this wild film. In one touching scene where John discusses his belief in helping to raise up the poor, McCarey captures her sudden, unexpected joy wash across her face as she finally sees a link between his secular and her religious belief systems. It’s unsurprisingly the only positive representation of Communism in the film, but it’s yet more evidence that McCarey can’t help but search for the good and bad in all of his characters, especially Lucille who is empathetic and subversively controlling in equal measures.
Ultimately, My Son John crumbles in its final act, with John’s sudden rejection of his previously strongly held convictions ringing quite hollow. This is due in large part to Walker’s death, at the age of 32, occurring during the film’s shoot, which required a major rewrite of the final half hour and the awkward use of insert shots from Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (which Walker made a year prior). If the first 90 minutes of My Son John are already deeply strange, these final sequences are like a full-on fever dream, including John’s much-anticipated graduation speech at his alma mater being delivered via tape recorder with a heavenly shaft of line landing on an empty podium.
The speech itself is a string of mindless, HUAC-approved platitudes, ironically preaching to the dangers of higher education to a large group of graduating seniors. It’s yet another contradiction that speaks to how ideologically vacant yet emotionally charged the anti-Communist witch hunt was, but it’s also perfectly in line with McCarey’s tendency to bring everything back to the spiritual realm. This final stretch is clumsy in a way that the film’s first two-thirds are not, but the raw emotional terrain McCarey steadfastly treads through makes this more than just an intriguing curio from a deeply troubling bygone era.
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