If you had predicted a year ago that Leo McCarey’s infamous anti-communist screed “My Son John” (1952) would be out on Blu-ray before Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” (1951) — even by a little under two months — I would have thought you were crazy. Though both films are noirish thrillers starring Robert Walker as flamboyant villains near the tragic end of his short career, for a variety of (mainly valid) reasons McCarey’s film doesn’t get a fraction of the respect that Hitchcock’s does. In fact, such is the notoriety of “My Son John” is that its 2010 premiere on Turner Classic Movies (as part of the “Shadows of Russia” series that I co-curated with Farran Smith Nehme) was the first time it had turned up on U.S. television since its only two previous screenings, on “ABC Sunday Night at the Movies” in 1974-75.
Never available on any video format and rarely shown in theatrical revivals (BAM was told last year that circulating prints are no longer available from Paramount) “My Son John” is arriving on Blu-ray and DVD today in a sharp new transfer from Olive Films — part of its ongoing licensing agreement with Paramount — showcasing the film’s noirish shadows and the details of the peculiarities of its troubled production history.
The nearly universally discredited “My Son John” found many new fans when it showed up on TCM — and not just among those who applauded its retro America-first rhetoric. Though seriously, and often bizarrely, compromised by Walker’s death before a series of reshoots planned by McCarey after completion of principal photography, “John” still offers a fascinating portrait of an explicitly Roman Catholic nuclear family threatened with implosion because of the the subversive activities of their oldest son, who works for an unnamed agency in the federal government.
Arriving for a visit home shortly after his two younger brothers go off to fight in Korea, Walker’s son openly mocks his dad, a World War II veteran and commie-hating member of the American Legion played by Dean Jagger (who had portrayed a Ukranian villager just a few years earlier in the pro-Soviet Hollywood opus “The North Star”). Walker even ridicules the parish priest (Frank McHugh, reprising his role from “Going My Way”). This causes great agitation for mom (Helen Hayes, in her much-touted first dramatic Hollywood role since 1935) who worries about her son’s political activities – which he jokingly tries to wave away by swearing he’s not a Communist with his hand on the family bible.
Dad eventually hits John over the head with that family bible, one of many of many oddly comic directorial touches that seem at odds with the insistence of McCarey’s script that dad is heroic and not a buffoon. Mom’s concerns about her firstborn coincide with a difficult menopause — perhaps the first explicit depiction of such in a Hollywood movie (and a phenomenon still rarely mentioned in films).
When TCM showed “John,” commenters on the network’s message board were divided on Hayes’ intense performance, with roughly half accusing Hayes (then known as “The First Lady of the American Theater”) of going way over the top. Certainly her performance of a child-like woman was more typical in movies of the early to mid-1930s rather than the more naturalistic early ’50s. There’s little doubt that her scenes with Walker are unusual for American mainstream movies of any era. Decades later, Hayes would recall in interviews how McCarey berated Walker, who complained about the film’s heavy-handed politics.
The film goes seriously off the rails in the second half, when McCarey had to wildly improvise because Walker, a serious alcoholic, had passed away after receiving an ill-advised injection of amobarbital from his psychiatrist. As an FBI agent (noir icon Van Heflin) who had surrepticiously befriended his mom closes in on John, McCarey resorts to the use of an obvious double — and outtakes from the film he had completed just prior, “Strangers on a Train.” (The next three paragraphs contain what might be called spoilers today).
Before Walker’s death, McCarey had said in interviews that he was consulting with Alfred Hitchcock in undertaking what was McCarey’s first thriller, and Hitch apparently helped him piece together the ending. One taxi cab scene in “My Son John” set in Washington (also the setting of large parts of “Strangers”) uses footage that doesn’t entirely crop out the incriminating cigarette lighter from “Strangers.”
“John” climaxes with John, who has been convinced of the error of his ways by his mother, ambushed by gun-toting subversives on his way to a meeting with the FBI. Agent Heflin arrives and looks into an overturned taxi where John is dying — and sees Walker in recycled footage from his “Strangers” death scene, his dialogue personally re-dubbed by McCarey.
It would be hard to top that scene for strangeness, but the final scene comes close. McCarey originally intended to end with John denouncing Communists in a speech at his alma mater. Walker had recorded the speech just before his death. In a bizarre case of art imitating life, Walker’s recording is played at an empty lectern (wreathed in a spotlight) so John can go out as a hero.
Walker’s performance as John has interesting overlaps with his work as the homicidal Bruno. Both characters are fixated on their mothers, and both John and Bruno have speech patterns and body language that can be read as gay by some contemporary audiences. “My Son John” has even been interpreted as an unwitting allegory about gay men in Washington during the McCarthy era.
“My Son John” received mostly vituperative reviews from overwhelmingly liberal reviewers and was — like almost all anti-Communist films of this era except “I Was A Communist for the FBI’ — a box-office flop. This despite the ardent endorsement of the American Legion, which overlooked what some viewers today might regard a Jagger’s less-than-flattering depiction of a member who is suspicious about exactly what his son has learned in college. But 60 years later, it’s a fascinating window into early 1950s political paranoia and a unique chapter in McCarey’s filmography.
McCarey had been one of Paramount’s top directors of the 1930s, helming such comedy classics as “Duck Soup” and “Ruggles of Red Gap.” But, like Frank Capra, he started combining comedy with drama, and had a falling out with the studio after the failure “Make Way For Tomorrow,” depicting the plight of elderly couple in what’s now recognized as a masterpiece. After working elsewhere, McCarey returned to Paramount for “Going My Way,” the 1944 Oscar winner for Best Picture, but he pointedly took the even more successful sequel, “The Bells of St. Mary’s” to RKO.
Paramount eventually bought the production company that McCarey formed for “Bells” to secure his return for “My Son John.” He returned to filmmaking several years later at Fox, where he scored his biggest hit, “An Affair to Remember” (a remake of McCarey’s 1939 “Love Affair”). This was bracketed by a pair of right-leaning pictures, “Rally Round the Flag Boys,” a satire on political activism set in liberal Connecticut with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; and McCarey’s final film, “Satan Never Sleeps” starring William Holden and Clfiton Webb as priests resisting Chinese communists.
In addition to previously announced new titles and reissues, the Warner Archive Collection is today releasing (not under its newly revived “Forbidden Hollywood label) a pair of Ray Enright-directed early talkies from 1930 with Grant Withers: “”Scarlet Pages”’ (1930), a crime drama starring Elsie Ferguson and Marion Nixon; and “Dancing Sweeties” (1930) a musical comedy with Sue Carol. Also Herman Hoffman’s “The Great American Pastime” (1956), a Little League comedy starring Tom Ewell, Anne Francis, Ann Miller and Dean Jones.
As I suspected, the 10-title Robert Mitchum set coming Oct. 9 from Fox/MGM is all previously available titles, several of which have appeared in other sets: “River of No Return,” “Night of the Hunter,” “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison,” “The Enemy Below,” “Thunder Road,” “The Hunters,” “The Longest Day,” “Man in the Middle,” “What A Way to Go!” and “The Way West.”