My Son John is a 1952 American political drama film directed by Leo McCarey and starring Helen Hayes, Van Heflin, Robert Walker and Dean Jagger.

The strongly anticommunist film, produced during the height of McCarthyism,[1] received an Oscar nomination for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story.

In uniform, Chuck and Ben Jefferson, strapping blonds who played high-school football, attend Sunday Mass with their parents before leaving for army service in Korea.

John tries to flee the country on a flight to Lisbon, but at the last minute finds faith in God, repents his actions and decides to turn himself in to Stedman.

Paramount built interest in the project by reporting the casting of each role, beginning with the news in December 1950 that Helen Hayes was considering it for her return to motion pictures after 17 years away from the film industry.

[5][6] The details of the story were kept secret while it was first described in one news report as "a contemporary drama about the relationship between a mother and son, described by McCarey as 'highly emotional but with much humor'.

"[7] Despite McCarey's "close-mouthed silence" for two months and a public warning to Hayes not to discuss the plot, it was reported that "word has gotten around Hollywood with the authority such wisps of information always have that the son ... is a traitor to his country–an agent of Communist espionage."

However, Walker died on August 28, 1951, less than a week after completing principal photography on the film and only a few hours after recording the audio for the ending speech.

[17] Bosley Crowther wrote in his review for The New York Times that the film represented its time perfectly in that it "corresponds with the present public ferment of angry resentment and fear" and that it is "a picture so strongly dedicated to the purpose of the American anti-Communist purge that it seethes with the sort of emotionalism and illogic that is characteristic of so much thinking these days."

He wrote that allowing a mother to condemn her son based on flimsy evidence shows the film's "hot emotional nature" and that its endorsement of bigotry and argument for religious conformity would "cause a thoughtful person to feel a shudder of apprehension."

He wrote:[19] Amid all this turmoil, an irony is that one of the latest films from Hollywood, My Son John, is a passionate endorsement of the relentless pursuit of American Communists to the extent that the acceptance of "guilt by association" is espoused.

Helen Hayes is the star of this picture as a mother who condemns her own son when she learns that he has been consorting with a girl who is charged with being a spy.

In the New York Herald Tribune, Ogden Reid, later a congressman, wrote: "McCarey's picture of how America ought to be is so frightening, so speciously argued, so full of warnings against an intelligent solution to the problem that it boomerangs upon its own cause.

"[16] The New Yorker wrote that the film advised the public to "cut out thinking, obey their superiors blindly, regard all political suspects as guilty without trial, revel in joy through strength, and pay more attention to football.

[21][22][23] In response to negative reviews from the New York critics, the Catholic Press Institute unanimously endorsed a resolution praising the film and Senator Karl Mundt entered a statement into the Congressional Record calling it "undoubtedly the greatest and most stirring pro-American motion picture of the last decade.

In his view, McCarey's "exquisitely sensitive" handling of the mother-son relationship in the first part of the film was undercut by Myles Connolly, a screenwriter known for writing many a "bullying speech" for Frank Capra.

[26] J. Hoberman noted the film's dual personality, writing that it "aspires to the warmth of a domestic comedy while remaining tendentious to the core, relentlessly unfunny and starkly melodramatic.