In this haunting Cold War melodrama, as a mother and son united by a bond of shared passions and intellect, Helen Hayes is clever and fretful as the situation demands while Robert Walker is ingenious and diabolic by turns. John is the pink sheep of the family: his two brothers, who together make a full-back (and -wit), are dispatched early in the film to Korea, but John, a college graduate and government diplomat, is suspected by both the FBI and his own parents of being a Communist agent. The incriminating evidence is his love for humanity, which he pompously professes; his preference for the intellectual life over football; and most importantly, his adoration of his professors over Dad (Dean Jagger), an American Legion fanatic who literally beats him over the head with the Bible. The film, which presumably sets out to show how Communism worms its way into the American family, instead demonstrates how witch-hunting as a national pastime enters the home, feeding family claustrophobia with paranoia. And it goes to outrageous lengths (in spite of itself) to suggest that Communism may succeed, where Dad fails, in breaking the incestuous bond between mother and son.