My Son John 1952

In uniform, Chuck Jefferson, Richard Jaeckel and Ben Jefferson, James Young, strapping blonds who played high-school football, attend Sunday Mass with their parents before leaving for army service in Korea. Their older brother John Jefferson, Robert Walker, sends regrets that he cannot join their farewell dinner because of his work for the federal government in Washington, DC.

A week later, John pays a surprise visit to his devoutly Catholic mother Lucille Jefferson, Helen Hayes, and American Legionnaire father Dan Jefferson, Dean Jagger. In conversation with their parish priest and them, John uses humor to make provocative statements and his attitude is resented.

He spends hours with one of his college professors, Sam Harris, leaving his parents feeling shortchanged.

Anxious about his son’s behavior, Dan gets into a car crash with John’s college friend Stedman, Van Heflin. Dan questions John’s loyalty after he mocks his anticommunist speech to the Legion and tries to rewrite it.

After Dan accuses him of being a communist and threatens him, John assures Lucille of his loyalty by swearing on her Bible, but Dan refuses to believe his son, and after an argument about the veracity of the Bible, beats him and tears his trousers.

The next morning, John asks Lucille to retrieve his trousers from the church clothing drive, and she finds a key. Stedman returns to inform her that he is an FBI agent investigating John, David Newell.

think with your heart, not your head.

When she returns the trousers to John, he claims it was a normal loyalty check, and the key is for an apartment of a female Soviet spy with whom John confesses to having an affair. Lucille refuses to accept his assurances of loyalty and begs him to confess, and declares that he deserves to be punished. However, John points out that the court will refuse to accept Lucille’s testimony, since she is suffering from a mental illness, which Stedman accuses John of causing.

Stedman advises him that he should use whatever free will you have. Give up. Name names.

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. However, John is killed by communist agents before he can do so, but he tells Stedman that he left a tape-recorded confession, which Stedman plays at his college’s commencement exercises. Later at church, Dan consoles a distraught Lucille, saying that John’s actions will eventually be forgotten, but that his words will be remembered.