I actually owned a bootleg 16mm copy of "My Son John" about 35 years ago and showed it as part of a "Sex, Drugs and Treason" festival on college campuses, along with "Pecker Island" and "Reefer Madness." "My Son John" is a movie which is almost comically awful, with Robert Walker swearing on the Bible that he's not a Communist; Dean Jagger singing "If you don't like your Uncle Sammy;" the Communists tapping the FBI's phones rather than vice versa; Robert Walker dying from a blast of a Commie machine gun after a geographically impossible chase through downtown Washington; the taped posthumous speech to a collection of frozen-faced graduates with warnings of "stimulants" leading to "narcotics;" and finally, Dean Jagger more or less telling Helen Hayes that their late son got what he deserved.
So bad, though, that it's absolutely sublime, sort of like a "Reefer Madness" of politics, with its stereotyped, one-dimensional characters and its glorification of authority figures. I must have shown this movie several dozen times within the course of two years, but I could never once refrain from watching it again. There is no other movie which quite captures the spirit of blind conformity to the ethos of the witch-hunt as does "My Son John." Finding this site by accident makes me want to track down my copy (I lent it to a friend 15 years ago and never got it back) and see if I can get it transferred onto a DVD. Seeing this movie is better than reading almost any conventional political history of this period. Easily an 8 on a 10 scale, even acknowledging that it's one of those Bizarroworld scales.
So bad, though, that it's absolutely sublime, sort of like a "Reefer Madness" of politics, with its stereotyped, one-dimensional characters and its glorification of authority figures. I must have shown this movie several dozen times within the course of two years, but I could never once refrain from watching it again. There is no other movie which quite captures the spirit of blind conformity to the ethos of the witch-hunt as does "My Son John." Finding this site by accident makes me want to track down my copy (I lent it to a friend 15 years ago and never got it back) and see if I can get it transferred onto a DVD. Seeing this movie is better than reading almost any conventional political history of this period. Easily an 8 on a 10 scale, even acknowledging that it's one of those Bizarroworld scales.