Thread: My Son John Finally Seen by America Again

My Son John Finally Seen by America Again | Print | E-mail
Written by Bruce Walker
Tuesday, 23 February 2010 10:00
Turner Movie Classics on February 27th showed its viewers My Son John, a 1952 film that Robert Osborne advised his audience had been deliberately put out of circulation since soon after it was released. In his introduction to the film, Osborne acknowledges that the film’s stars and producers were first rate. The cast included Helen Hayes, Van Heflin, and Robert Walker. Osborne also makes it clear that the film is an embarrassment to the film industry, full of childish anti-Communism and the foolish paranoia of America in the 1950s.

My Son John, in fact, is a chilling prediction of the growth of those evils which have dragged America to its present sickness. The main theme of the film was the dangers of communism. In the last twenty years we have learned that Soviet penetration of America in the 1940s was greater than most anti-Communists had believed. Scholars have examined the mass murder or democide of the Soviet Union and Maoist China and determined that these two communist regimes each killed more people than the Nazis or the Japanese in the Second World War. It is just as impossible to be moral without condemning communism than it is to be moral without condemning the Holocaust.

Yet many professors in America hate anti-communism. Michael Moore has made a film championing the health care system of Marxist Cuba, despite its grim awfulness. Communists paid an important role in the life of Obama. Communism, a misology which is, perhaps, the most destructive in human history, is taken as seriously in America now than it was when My Son John was made. Even calling communism bad today is considered bad manners.

Dean Jagger, the father of John in the film, plays a school teacher who is threatened with termination for mentioning the word “Godâ€

I just searched for it and it's not yet in their catalog.

I have to find this movie! I had never heard of it before now.