My Son John

Elliott Stein in the Village Voice: "By the early 1950s, McCarey had become a raging rightist and active member of the Society for the Preservation of American Ideals. In his most problematic film, My Son John (1951), a small-town couple is shattered by the revelation that their son is a Commie agent. Some of this picture's gruesome peculiarity stems from the fact that Robert Walker, who appears in the title role, died suddenly before production was completed; the actor's death scene was patched together from shots "borrowed" from his death scene in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, made a year earlier. The confrontational ruckuses are charged with lunatic weirdness—for starters, redneck dad smacking Red-agent son on the head with the family Bible. Whatever it thinks it's saying, My Son John has more to say about American '50s hysteria than any other film ever made." "What is most sadly ironic about My Son John is that its nauseatingly McCarthyist second half perversely contradicts all the valid points made earlier, thus retroactively invalidating some 60 minutes of what comes close to being McCarey's best work of writing and direction... Because of their negative reaction to the film's reactionary message, most critics have been unable to acknowledge the subtle beauty of the first part..." - Jean-Pierre Coursodon, American Directors