Caution: Contains spoilers
There are countless strands in what Richard Hofstadter termed the `paranoid style in American Politics.' In My Son John, Leo McCarey (the Frank-Capraesque director of Duck Soup, Ruggles of Red Gap and Going My Way), weaves several of them into the most emotionally loaded and propagandistically shameless Red Scare movie of the cold-war years. He reassembles the apparatus of the home-front tearjerker, retired after deployment during World War II, to feed fears of Soviet infiltration. Rarely resuscitated, My Son John remains a glimpse into a tribal mind-set that by no means vanished with the disgrace and death of Senator Joe McCarthy but even after the turn of a new millennium enjoys its vogue.
The Jeffersons are middle-Americans right out of Norman Rockwell cover art. Patriarch Dean Jagger is a schoolteacher, Legionnaire, pipe-smoker and beer-drinker (though when vexed switches to Bourbon). Mom is apple-cheeked, twinkly-eyed Helen Hayes, active in her church's Ladies' Solidarity and even more so in keeping tabs on her three grown sons. Two of them (beefy blonds Richard Jaeckel and James Young) present no obvious problem, as former halfbacks headed off to fight the Korean War. (Normal or no, one of them bids mom farewell by a slap on her rear end.) The third, dark-haired child, however (Robert Walker), never tossed a pigskin in his life (the first clue), but in compensation boasts `more degrees than a thermometer.' Consequently of course he's a non-believer. Also, he's a big shot in Washington - and, as it will emerge, an operative of the Communist conspiracy.
My Son John keeps the revelation of his sinister, secret life firmly within the bosom of this increasingly screwy family, augmented by a priest and a doctor. Old hostilities erupt on one of Walker's rare visits home. While Hayes labors to keep up the facade of normalcy by bustling around like Fay Bainter and mugging like a simpleton, she defaults to mournful reverie more appropriate to Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night. Jagger stays full of bluster and received opinion, another simpleton doing duty as model citizen. Against a barrage of parental prying (`People in Washington are starting to see things as they are, aren't they?' and `Do you have a girl yet?' and `What church are you going to in Washington?'), Walker maintains a detached air of amused condescension, baffling Hayes (whom he soothingly dismisses as `dear' and `darling') and needling Jagger (hence, the whiskey).
Half a century later, Walker's irony has another register to it, that of an urban (and urbane) homosexual parrying the thrusts of parochial snoops. Even at the time it probably had this resonance, if more faintly, since sodomy, atheism and Communism made up the unholy, if unspoken, triad of the times (aka: moral turpitude). But the hint of sexual unorthodoxy may owe to Walker's reprising his Bruno Anthony in Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train of the previous year, where his interactions with dotty mother (Marion Lorne) and unseen but hated father are much like the dynamics of the Jefferson family. (This identification has an even closer source, of which more later.) And Hayes' penetration of her son John's wicked ways comes from wounded maternal pride (`When it gets to the stage that you're making fun of a mother's love...,' she accuses, breaking off in horror).
But on the surface, Walker's derelictions are not any liaisons he may pursue in Rock Creek Park after midnight but his abandonment first of his faith then of patriotism. When he urges Hayes to take the pills the doctor has prescribed for her (apparently, some menopausal nostrum), she comes back with `What about Moses and the tablets he left behind with the prescription written right on them?' Boasting that the only reading that matters to her are cookbook and Bible, she makes him swear on it (the Good Book, not Good Housekeeping) that he is `not now nor ever was' a member of the Communist Party, as if the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities had convened in the homey kitchen. Moments later, Jagger makes him repeat the same oath but won't accept it, on the grounds that the Bible means nothing to dialectical materialists. (Had Walker been a JayCee and a Taft Republican, it wouldn't have warmed Jagger's iced-up heart.)
The movie careens along an ever murkier trajectory. Van Heflin insinuates himself deviously into their lives, in a way more typical of Eastern-Bloc secret police than of J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I. When a key left in a pair of torn pants precipitates an urgent call from Walker, Hayes dutifully retrieves them from the church charity drive and boards a plane to Washington to deliver them. Intercepted and set up by Heflin, she finds that the key unlocks the door to a convicted spy's apartment - finally, the furtive love-nest uncovered through a mother's vigilance! (Happily, the spy turns out to be female, so at least her worst suspicions are allayed.)
The plot, which had shown some measure of control, grows more hysterical as it thrashes around looking for a way out. Hayes, decompensating as battily as Gloria Swanson in the last reel of Sunset Blvd., sings snatches of the `Battle Hymn of the Republic' and spouts football metaphors. And Walker suddenly undergoes a dark night of the soul, precipitated by - what else? - his love for his mother.
To be fair, the making of My Son John suffered the worst kind of catastrophe: Before principal photography was completed, Walker died (of an adverse reaction to a shot of the sedative sodium amytal, potentiated by the level of alcohol customarily in his bloodstream). So the final cut was cobbled together from existing footage augmented with outtakes from Strangers On A Train (there are oddly-composed shots of Walker speaking silently from telephone booths). In the movie, Walker (as he would do simultaneously off screen) meets an abrupt quietus; he was on his way to `infect' the graduating class of his alma mater through a commencement speech. And the film's conclusion freezes into a long, hieratic tableau: A shaft of radiant light (suggestive either of divine grace or an interrogation chamber) floods the empty podium as Walker's tape-recorded voice delivers his anguished recantation. This sustained note of redemption rings as false to the traditions of cinema as it does to the politics of the time and to any mature grasp of human nature.
There are countless strands in what Richard Hofstadter termed the `paranoid style in American Politics.' In My Son John, Leo McCarey (the Frank-Capraesque director of Duck Soup, Ruggles of Red Gap and Going My Way), weaves several of them into the most emotionally loaded and propagandistically shameless Red Scare movie of the cold-war years. He reassembles the apparatus of the home-front tearjerker, retired after deployment during World War II, to feed fears of Soviet infiltration. Rarely resuscitated, My Son John remains a glimpse into a tribal mind-set that by no means vanished with the disgrace and death of Senator Joe McCarthy but even after the turn of a new millennium enjoys its vogue.
The Jeffersons are middle-Americans right out of Norman Rockwell cover art. Patriarch Dean Jagger is a schoolteacher, Legionnaire, pipe-smoker and beer-drinker (though when vexed switches to Bourbon). Mom is apple-cheeked, twinkly-eyed Helen Hayes, active in her church's Ladies' Solidarity and even more so in keeping tabs on her three grown sons. Two of them (beefy blonds Richard Jaeckel and James Young) present no obvious problem, as former halfbacks headed off to fight the Korean War. (Normal or no, one of them bids mom farewell by a slap on her rear end.) The third, dark-haired child, however (Robert Walker), never tossed a pigskin in his life (the first clue), but in compensation boasts `more degrees than a thermometer.' Consequently of course he's a non-believer. Also, he's a big shot in Washington - and, as it will emerge, an operative of the Communist conspiracy.
My Son John keeps the revelation of his sinister, secret life firmly within the bosom of this increasingly screwy family, augmented by a priest and a doctor. Old hostilities erupt on one of Walker's rare visits home. While Hayes labors to keep up the facade of normalcy by bustling around like Fay Bainter and mugging like a simpleton, she defaults to mournful reverie more appropriate to Mary Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night. Jagger stays full of bluster and received opinion, another simpleton doing duty as model citizen. Against a barrage of parental prying (`People in Washington are starting to see things as they are, aren't they?' and `Do you have a girl yet?' and `What church are you going to in Washington?'), Walker maintains a detached air of amused condescension, baffling Hayes (whom he soothingly dismisses as `dear' and `darling') and needling Jagger (hence, the whiskey).
Half a century later, Walker's irony has another register to it, that of an urban (and urbane) homosexual parrying the thrusts of parochial snoops. Even at the time it probably had this resonance, if more faintly, since sodomy, atheism and Communism made up the unholy, if unspoken, triad of the times (aka: moral turpitude). But the hint of sexual unorthodoxy may owe to Walker's reprising his Bruno Anthony in Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train of the previous year, where his interactions with dotty mother (Marion Lorne) and unseen but hated father are much like the dynamics of the Jefferson family. (This identification has an even closer source, of which more later.) And Hayes' penetration of her son John's wicked ways comes from wounded maternal pride (`When it gets to the stage that you're making fun of a mother's love...,' she accuses, breaking off in horror).
But on the surface, Walker's derelictions are not any liaisons he may pursue in Rock Creek Park after midnight but his abandonment first of his faith then of patriotism. When he urges Hayes to take the pills the doctor has prescribed for her (apparently, some menopausal nostrum), she comes back with `What about Moses and the tablets he left behind with the prescription written right on them?' Boasting that the only reading that matters to her are cookbook and Bible, she makes him swear on it (the Good Book, not Good Housekeeping) that he is `not now nor ever was' a member of the Communist Party, as if the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities had convened in the homey kitchen. Moments later, Jagger makes him repeat the same oath but won't accept it, on the grounds that the Bible means nothing to dialectical materialists. (Had Walker been a JayCee and a Taft Republican, it wouldn't have warmed Jagger's iced-up heart.)
The movie careens along an ever murkier trajectory. Van Heflin insinuates himself deviously into their lives, in a way more typical of Eastern-Bloc secret police than of J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I. When a key left in a pair of torn pants precipitates an urgent call from Walker, Hayes dutifully retrieves them from the church charity drive and boards a plane to Washington to deliver them. Intercepted and set up by Heflin, she finds that the key unlocks the door to a convicted spy's apartment - finally, the furtive love-nest uncovered through a mother's vigilance! (Happily, the spy turns out to be female, so at least her worst suspicions are allayed.)
The plot, which had shown some measure of control, grows more hysterical as it thrashes around looking for a way out. Hayes, decompensating as battily as Gloria Swanson in the last reel of Sunset Blvd., sings snatches of the `Battle Hymn of the Republic' and spouts football metaphors. And Walker suddenly undergoes a dark night of the soul, precipitated by - what else? - his love for his mother.
To be fair, the making of My Son John suffered the worst kind of catastrophe: Before principal photography was completed, Walker died (of an adverse reaction to a shot of the sedative sodium amytal, potentiated by the level of alcohol customarily in his bloodstream). So the final cut was cobbled together from existing footage augmented with outtakes from Strangers On A Train (there are oddly-composed shots of Walker speaking silently from telephone booths). In the movie, Walker (as he would do simultaneously off screen) meets an abrupt quietus; he was on his way to `infect' the graduating class of his alma mater through a commencement speech. And the film's conclusion freezes into a long, hieratic tableau: A shaft of radiant light (suggestive either of divine grace or an interrogation chamber) floods the empty podium as Walker's tape-recorded voice delivers his anguished recantation. This sustained note of redemption rings as false to the traditions of cinema as it does to the politics of the time and to any mature grasp of human nature.