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Washington Paranoia from the Left and Right: THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL & MY SON JOHN

Written in July 2008. If memory serves, this was for an issue of Stop Smiling devoted to Washington, D.C. — J.R.

To get the full measure of what Cold War paranoia was doing

to the American soul, two of the best Hollywood A-pictures

of the early 50s, each of which pivots around its Washington,

D.C. locations – The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and My

Son John (1952) — still speak volumes about their shared zeitgeist,

even though they couldn’t be further apart politically.

An archetypal liberal parable in the form of a science fiction

thriller and an archetypal right-wing family tragedy (with deft

slapstick interludes) that’s even scarier, they’re hardly equal in

terms of their reputations. Leo McCarey’s My Son John, widely

regarded today as an embarrassment for its more hysterical elements,

has scandalously never come out on video or DVD, though in its

own era it garnered even more prestige than Robert Wise’s SF

thriller, having received an Academy Award nomination for best

screenplay. It also features the last and in some ways richest film

performances of both Helen Hayes and Robert Walker. (Although she

lived another four decades, Hayes chose never to act in a feature again,

and Walker died unexpectedly while My Son John was still being shot,

from an overdose of the sedative sodium amytal, administered by

his doctor in ambiguous circumstances.)

At once profound about the dynamics of family discord

involving cultural differences and deranged about the Communist

menace, My Son John shows with equal sincerity and intensity

McCarey’s complex understanding of people and his unqualified

support of the FBI’s totalitarian surveillance of his most sympathetic

character (Hayes), when she confirms what they already know —-

that her favorite son (Walker), John, a Washington bureaucrat, is a

Communist agent. When she finds that a key in John’s trousers

unlocks the Washington flat of another agent (a character based on

the spy Elizabeth Bentley, who defected and gave names at an

HUAC hearing in 1948), at least four concealed cameras by

“caring” agents are needed to capture every nuance of her private

grief.

The Day the Earth Stood Still, still rightly considered a

classic in everything from its Theremin-enhanced Bernard Herrmann

score to its fine pacing and performances, continues to be pointed

and timely —and not only because Close Encounters of the Third

Kind (1977) was clearly indebted to it. Adapted loosely by Edmund

H. North (whose previous credits included Young Man with a Horn

and In a Lonely Place) from a Harry Bates story, it recounts the

landing in Washington of a flying saucer with a benign alien named

Klaatu (Michael Rennie). Tall and wise, he carries a universal

message of peace for all mankind, but trigger-happy Cold

Warriors imprison him and then much later, after he escapes and moves

through Washington incognito, shoot him before he can deliver his message.

He then has to be resurrected by a giant robot-protector who guards his

flying saucer; he also has to shut offmost of the electricity in the world

for half an hour in order to get  everybody’s attention, which accounts for

the movie’s title. Thanks to his human appearance, Klaatu can initially roam

the streets of Washington undetected under the name Carpenter  (one of the

movie’s touches of Christian allegory). His only human allies prove to be a local

widow (Patricia Neal) and her 13-year-old son (Billy Gray) — his landlady and

local tour guide, respectively — and a gentle physicist clearly modeled on Einstein

(Sam Jaffe, whom part of the studio brass at 20^th Century-Fox tried to remove from

the project due to his leftist background).

Producer Julian Blaustein has said that the film’s progressive slant was

inspired in part by the absurdity of such everyday Cold War terms as “peace

offensive”. That the movie isn’t exaggerating the crazed paranoid climate of

its era can perhaps be seen most readily in the willingness of real-life radio

newscaster Gabriel Heater to play himself, broadcasting his conviction that

Klaatu has to be “hunted down like a wild animal” as soon as he manages to

escape from the clutches of the U.S. military. By the same token, what seems

most dated and naïve about the film is also what’s most typical about it —-

the fact that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization would choose to address

the entire world by landing in the U.S. capitol and proceeding no further.

No less typically, the movie’s Washington locations —- including many

familiar standbys, such as the Lincoln Memorial (duly admired by Klaatu)

and the nearby Arlington Cemetery — were filmed by second unit, as they

were in My Son John, although this is so skillfully done that you may not

always notice it. (Speaking years later, as an adult, Billy Gray — who

describes this film as the one he’s in that he’s proudest of —- recalls how

disappointed he was as a kid about not being able to travel to Washington.)

My Son John uses the Lincoln Memorial even more centrally, as the site where

John dies after he splits from the Party and then gets machine-gunned by his

former comrades from a passing car, causing his cab to flip over on the Memorial’s

steps. An association of Robert Walker with this hallowed spot was already made

in The Beginning or the End, a 1947 docudrama about the development of the

Atomic bomb, where he played one of the pilots who dropped the bomb on

Hiroshima, and later turns up at the Lincoln Memorial to reflect on the meaning

of it all. And he could later be seen in many other D.C. locations when he played

the creepy villain in Strangers on a Train (1951), decked out with various

stereotypical gay mannerisms and accoutrements —- a bold casting coup on the

part of Alfred Hitchcock when one considers that Walker had previously been

known for his conventionally “wholesome” romantic roles in films such as The

Clock (as Judy Garland’s costar) and Till the Clouds Roll By (as composer

Jerome Kern).

Somewhere in Middle America, 500 miles from Washington, lives the upright

and aptly named Jeffersons of My Son John: Dan (Dean Jagger), the jingoistic

and frankly dumb father; Lucille (Hayes), the more liberal and high-strung

mother; and their three sons —- two football jocks preparing to leave and fight

in Korea in the opening scene, and John, the only absent family member and

the best educated, an intellectual who’s grown apart from the others and now

works in Washington in an unspecified government job. As Lucille boasts to a

stranger (who later turns out to be an FBI agent named Steadman), “He has

more degrees than a thermometer.”

The story proper starts when John finally comes home on a visit and his parents

gradually and painfully discover he’s become a secret agent. But even before

that discovery is made, mainly through the good graces of Steadman (Van

Heflin)—- as wise and benign as Klaatu, though short rather than tall —- John’s

uneasy banter and half-concealed sarcasm already marks him as a not-so-benign

alien, someone clearly preferring the company of his former professors to that

of his family or their local priest. (In The Devil Finds Work, James Baldwin

praises Walker’s “gleefully vicious parody of the wayward American son,”

which he finds “absolutely heartless and hilarious, acting out all of his mother’s

terrors, including, and especially, the role of flaming faggot, which is his father’s

terror, too.”) He’s much closer to Lucille than he is to Dan —- who actually hits

John on the head with Lucille’s Bible in one moment of rage. Yet when she

innocently asks her son, “You got a girl?”, he can only respond, “Well,

sentimentalizing over the biological urge isn’t really a guarantee of human

happiness, dear.”

Though Walker was far too skillful to give the same performance twice, the

sinister aura he acquired from Hitchcock was partially carried over into John,

where the suggestion of gayness is conveyed more by the plot (John’s “dirty”

secret) than by any overt mannerisms. McCarey falsely claimed after Walker’s

death that he’d already completed his work on the film, out of fear that its

commercial success would be jinxed, meanwhile undertaking a frantic,

intricate, and far-fetched revision of the story that involved, among other

things, matting in silent images of Walker from Hitchcock’s film, killing off

his character at the end, and even dubbing John’s final words himself, spoken

in an eerie whisper. Originally, John was supposed to give the commencement

address at his alma mater after his (improbable) recanting, and in preparation for

this scene, Walker recorded the speech on tape shortly before his death. McCarey

then had John do the same thing so that his speech on tape could be played back at

the commencement in the final sequence.

Demonizing respectively Cold Warriors and Communists, The Day the Earth

Stood Still and My Son John might be described as cautionary tales about

the perils of thinking too little and thinking too much. The thoughts are richer

in the first, but the feelings count for more in the second.