In Leo McCarey’s new film, My Son John, Nathan Glick finds an example of that undiscriminating anti-Communism which uses the idea of “Communism” as a stick to beat any and all unpopular ideas or ways of living, and which has prompted many thoughtful people to react away from the necessary task of identifying the Communist threat in serious terms.
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Postwar anti-Communist films like The Iron Curtain, The Red Danube, and I Was a Communist for the FBI proved to be opportunistic celluloid pamphlets, candied snowballs in the cold war, trivial restitution for such wartime falsifications of Soviet reality as Mission to Moscow and North Star. Leo McCarey’s new film, My Son John, does not belong to this bandwagon category, although it too uses a journalistic springboard: the Hiss and Coplon cases. It is a shrewd, serious, even a seriously religious film, but its commonplace smalltown middle-class domestic setting and its air of merely repeating old-fashioned truisms may divert the spectator from its careful art and charged doctrine.
Behind a folkish facade, My Son John paints a sophisticated and deadly portrait of a young government-employed Communist intellectual suspected of espionage and under investigation by the FBI. And in the guise of reaffirming American platitudes, McCarey lumps together into a single heretical amalgam Communism, liberalism, and secularism. The chatty tone, the homespun humor, the appearance of genial tolerance, the trick of endowing spiritual symbols of nobility like mothers and priests with eccentric foibles—all characteristic of such earlier McCarey films as Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s—are in My Son John simply well-paced diversions from the film’s relentless theology of heresy and damnation. To question the infallibility of church or parent, the film declares, is to open the floodgates of evil. Although the film’s professed aim is to turn the hearts of intelligent young Americans against Communist error, it seems to be more profoundly concerned to shut their minds altogether.
In his posthumous confession at the end of the picture, John’s recorded voice describes to the graduating class of his college his own first steps toward perdition. “I was flattered when I was immediately recognized as an intellect. I was invited to homes where only superior minds communed. It excited my freshman fancy to hear daring thoughts that I wouldn’t have dreamed of when I lived at home—a bold defiance of the only authorities I ever knew, my church and my mother and father. I know that many of you have experienced that stimulation. But stimulants lead to narcotics.” And where does this vicious habit of intellectual curiosity end up? With the substitution of “faith in men for faith in God. . . the most cunning, fiendish, and brilliantly deceptive ideology yet devised to incite God’s creatures to turn against Him and against each other!”
It is significant that the Communist threat is defined not in terms of political terror, slave labor, or the destruction of free expression, but solely in terms of this supposed “faith in man”—a weirdly misplaced indictment. The makers of this film cannot reject Communism on the basis of its absolute power, because the principle most frequently and variously propounded in My Son John is an absolutism of its own: the absolute authority of church and parents, their exclusive possession of an absolute truth, and the unmitigated sinfulness of questioning that truth. Thus when John returns home (to “Anytown”) from Washington after a year’s absence, his father, an ardent American Legionnaire brimming over with patriotic clichés, can hardly wait to test his son’s orthodoxy. Before long, the household takes on the aspect of an Inquisition chamber, with the father threatening violence at the mere suspicion of John’s heterodoxy, and the mother pleading with John to swear on the family Bible that he is not a Communist.
Actually this atmosphere of hysteria is hardly related to any observable indications of John’s Communist allegiance. John’s father suspects him of being a Communist because he is educated, irritatingly “superior,” and fastidious; when the father’s suspicion turns out to be correct, the effect is to confirm the spectator’s distrust of those personal qualities which in John’s case have proved to be symptoms of Communism. Thus the result is less an indictment of Communism than a use of the Communist issue to discredit the intellectual, the reformer, and the liberal. John’s father would think he was a Communist even if he were not.
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Whatever logic the film can claim is contained not in its political rationale, but in its working out of personal relationships. There is obviously more to the father-son hostility than simply ideological difference. The tension, coldness, and mutual baiting has other, and older, sources. It soon becomes clear that the father sees John as a threat to his self-esteem. His fears that a college education would only serve to add to his son’s condescension make him rancorous against “those intellectuals I’ve read about.” He spits in derision when John runs up the university stairs to embrace his old professor, whose gray head is literally “long-haired.” Blind faith provides the father with his only safeguard against the dangerous world of ideas. (It comes as a shock to the spectator to learn that the father is by profession a school teacher.) Against his son’s “enlightened” mockery, he presents a rock-dense mind. He insists that he believes every word of the Bible, including the parts he doesn’t understand. Insecure on the ground of information and logic, he resorts to his paternal authority, and while he continually prods John into discussions, the only basis he is willing to accept is submission to his own few and unaired ideas. Yet the father is one of the film’s heroes, endorsed because of his failings rather than in spite of them. That such a father is bound to alienate an intelligent and questioning son proves, in the film’s logic, not the tragedy of stupidity but the danger of intelligence.
To the father, and to the film-makers, the two younger sons represent ideal contrasts to the finicky, mincing John. These are hefty blond athletes, former halfbacks on the high-school team (John might have been saved, one realizes, if only he had gone out for college sports), and now infantry corporals headed for Korea. The more one sees of the explosive, bumbling father and the intense, unpredictable mother, the less likely it seems that they could have produced such bland untroubled extroverts. But McCarey makes excellent use of the boys to establish an ail-American family atmosphere in contrast to the unhappy effect of the prodigal son. The film opens on a beautifully luminous long shot of the small-town street with the boys tossing a football in front of their house. As the camera comes closer, one of them poises the ball for a long throw but instead slyly tosses it sideways to take the watching father unawares. This act and the joshing it provokes, like the later slap on the mother’s rump administered by one of the boys to break up a sentimental leave-taking, are liberties within the proper bounds of filial feeling. The rough-and-ready physical extroversion, the very vulgarity of the slap, are tokens of essential good nature and respectfulness; whereas John’s precise, taunting, carefully polite manner reveals the intellectual’s disdainful sense of his own superiority to his less schooled parents.
In the role of John, Robert Walker displays an uncanny power to electrify the screen with cold embarrassment. Partly a carry-over from his previous role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (after Walker’s death, a few gaps were filled with shots that had been made for the earlier film), the effeminacy of certain gestures, and the insinuating way in which he half-smilingly stares his parents down are certainly also in accord with the film’s vision of the intellectual as unwholesome. Walker’s handling of sardonic lines and his miming of controlled mental outrage at his father’s brasher crudities do give a certain authenticity to his portrait of an intellectual. But despite the film’s attempt to portray him as a dangerously brilliant thinker, John is, on the evidence offered, a rather half-baked ideologue, sporting banalities of scientism as testimony to his advanced thinking. This portrait is Leo McCarey’s middle-brow refraction of the low-brow’s idea of the highbrow.
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Walker’s exacerbated characterization of the skeptic son is matched by the strange performance of Helen Hayes as the hallowed symbol of American motherhood. The original intention of the role, as one reads it in the screenplay, is to show the mother as vivacious and whimsical, to make her symbolic virtues concrete rather than diffuse. But the script also describes her as a woman in menopause, and Helen Hayes has applied herself to this aspect of the role with such intensity that her most prosaic gestures suggest more than the normal disturbance. Her quivering continuous facial movement, her rolling of the eyes, her uncontrollable grimaces are not clearly related to any visible stimuli, but bespeak a troubled, diffuse, wayward internal life. It is almost as if Miss Hayes sensed the driving irrationality behind the film and decided to give it its due.
But her neurotic behavior may serve the additional function of confusing the questionable motherly feelings which in the end drive her to testify against her son to the FBI. This act carries with it the curious suggestion that she is disowning John and adopting as her true spiritual son in his place the FBI agent played by Van Heflin. The film was made in a spirit of strong Catholic piety (although it can by no means be taken as presenting an official Catholic viewpoint, which one would expect to be a good deal more carefully reasoned and compassionate), and it is perhaps the Catholic mother’s traditional desire for her son to become a priest that accounts for her attraction in the film to the FBI man. For as the film unfolds, it is this government agent who adopts the role of the priest. The actual parish priest, played by Frank McHugh, is a simple ineffectual figure, obviously out of his depth in politics and never in the film confronted with the central political issue. The FBI agent, by contrast, is firm and wise, acting as guide to the mother and eventually as confessor to the errant son. It is he who expounds to the mother the meaning of Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln, and the Arlington dead, and who draws for the graduating class the moral of John’s final statement. (“The evil that men do lives after them,” he begins, and his voice fades out as the parents go to chapel to pray for John.)
The continuing trick of My Son John is to use the symbols of religious, national, and domestic piety as a bludgeon against any kind of pluralistic thinking. Even the photography is directed toward a single anti-human thematic effect. Both interior and exterior shots are almost supernaturally limpid and still, as if daylight were being filtered through the clerestory of a cathedral. In contrast to the homes in such films as Since You Went Away, The Best Years of Our Lives, and I Want You, which also vaunted middle-class virtues, the home in My Son John is treated as an immaculate place of worship. There is no cluttter in this home, nothing obtrudes carelessly on any table or bureau surface, nothing is out of place. And the film’s antiseptic vision of the physical home is only one aspect of its antiseptic vision of the problems of mind and religion and politics.
What finally vitiates the film is the high arrogance, and even more the patronizing condescension with which it tries to redeem the philistine, the Babbitt, and the vigilante. This is not the work of simple men made desperate and defensive by their inability to understand or cope with a threatening and complicated world. The makers of the film are sophisticated men who know how outrageously simple-minded their “good” characters are. But in a fervor of doctrine and Machiavellianism, they have decided to defend precisely what is intellectually outrageous, assuring the benighted that ignorance, violence, and bigotry are divine gifts.
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