To the Editor:
Not even my gratitude for the many splendid things COMMENTARY has done can still my feeling of strong dissent from Nathan Glick’s review of “My Son John” as “Leo McCarey’s Authoritarian Film” (May).
Mr. Glick complains that the picture “lumps into a single heretical amalgam, Communism, liberalism, and secularism.” That is not what the film really does, but I do suspect that Mr. Glick is guilty of lumping together into a single authoritarian amalgam, conservatism, patriotism, and religious faith.
True, McCarey does not content himself with the narrow field of post-Yalta Stalinism, but attacks on a much broader front—indeed on a very broad front. He goes so far as to identify the arrogance and vanity of sterile, materialist intellectualism with Communism. And I must confess that I, too, regard Communism as just part of the cycle of “secularist” intellectualism. . . .
It is to be regretted that this film succumbs in its end to typical Hollywood melodrama. But that does not wholly negate its greatness in bringing to the life of the popular screen the true identify of Communism as a form or expression of unrooted intellectualism.
While McCarey, naturally enough for him, uses a Catholic background, I found no insuperable difficulty in substituting a Jewish background and I am sure Protestants would find the process no more difficult. . . .
Philip Hochstein
Editor
Newark Star-Ledger
Newark, New Jersey