Annoyingly square 1950s movie with a worm of weirdness in the middle. Mostly it’s clumsily-made propaganda, but the dialogue pops at times, and EGOT Helen Hayes is very good, bringing real personality to a bland mother role. Movie feels like a play, with long takes (ruined with weird edits via optical zoom), the family naturalistically stuttering over their lines. You wouldn’t think it’s the work of a 30-year veteran director, but at least it’s lovably eccentric – you also wouldn’t guess this all-talk bible-vs-communism story would end in a car chase and shootout.

Dad vs. Red John:

Mom listens in:

Mom has nothing to talk about except when her kids were little, which seems familiar. John (Robert Walker, department store worker in One Touch of Venus) is doing important work in Washington while the other two songs (one from a John Carpenter movie, the other from a movie John Carpenter remade) head off to war. Dad (sheriff of Forty Guns) is exasperating, decides John is a commie then whacks him with a bible and pushes him over a table. Nobody in this movie can take a joke – that’s the root of the problem.

John really is a commie though, and FBI agent Van Heflin (a major player on the cowboy scene in 3:10 to Yuma) is hanging around the house, dancing around what exact degree of treason the kid is being charged with. After John doesn’t survive the car chase, movie peters out with his pre-taped speech warning the youth about soviet infiltration.

Mom vs. the FBI:

Cowboy Dan reviews the rushes:

My second movie in consecutive weeks where someone calls a person “whozis.” Will Sloan: “Contains some nice Game of Death-style trickery to conceal the fact that the titular Son John died during production.” Rosenbaum: “At once profound about the dynamics of family discord involving cultural differences and deranged about the Communist menace.” Kehr: “An appalling masterpiece. Resist the temptation to laugh at the film’s violent anticommunism and try to see it as the audiences of 1952 did, and you’ll experience the most wrenching right-wing film ever made.”