Hollywood and the Cold War Seminar: Following the screening of My Son John, you are invited to stay for a roundtable discussion on the subject of the Cold War in Hollywood films. Participants will be screenwriter and director Abraham Polonsky and screenwriter Alvah Bessie, both blacklisted; Nora Sayre, author of “Running Time: Films of the Cold War”; and Professors Paul Thomas and Michael Rogin of the UC Berkeley Department of Political Science.

The centerpiece of the Hollywood and the Cold War series is this haunting Leo McCarey melodrama that captures the hysteria of the day in its every shot. You may dream about Helen Hayes and Robert Walker tonight; they are unforgettable as Mother and Son--she, clever and fretful as the situation demands, he ingenious and diabolical by turns. They have a bond that is enforced by the fact that they are the only two in the family with any brains--a line that is delineated from the opening shots of Father (Dean Jagger) walking up to the family home supported on either side by his two other sons, who together make a fullback and wit. Sons one and two are dispatched to Korea, where they spend the rest of the film in absentia, leaving Father essentially alone with a loving wife and her best-loved son, John. The pink sheep of the family, John is a college graduate and government diplomat suspected by both the FBI and his own family of being a Communist agent. As his wife is increasingly possessed by the desire to recapture John (lest all her sons be lost to wars hot and cold), Father becomes fanatic in his American Legion affiliation and turns violently against him (beating him with a Bible). The incriminating evidence is John's love for humanity, which he pompously professes, his love for the intellectual life over football, and most of all his love for his professors over Dad. As John, Walker makes the most of the mocking instability he perfected in Strangers on a Train--from him the simple request, “turn left at the next corner, Dad,” is laden with significance (especially since Dad hesitates)!
Setting out to show how Communism worms its way into the American family, McCarey instead turns out the most accurate demonstration on film of how witch-hunting as a national pastime enters the home and feeds family claustrophobia with paranoia. The film is outrageous, comparable only to The Manchurian Candidate; but what the 1962 film cartoons, My Son John, made in 1952, takes completely, devastatingly seriously. In both films, Communism succeeds where Dad fails to threaten the incestuous bond between mother and son (here the son, not the mother, betrays the bond). And in both films, the force of good is held up as an antidote to Communism; but here, Catholicism proves stronger medicine than liberalism does in the more cynical Manchurian Candidate. (JB)