SILVER

Parts of MY SON JOHN were filmed on location in Wheaton, Maryland. The screening will be preceded by a slideshow documenting the location work, compiled by Pat Carroll.

Director Leo McCarey will forever be regarded as a filmmaking legend, primarily for his work with Laurel and Hardy, DUCK SOUP with the Marx Brothers, the iconic screwball comedy THE AWFUL TRUTH with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, and the Oscar®-winning GOING MY WAY starring Bing Crosby. But McCarey was also an ardent Catholic and committed Conservative, and his 1952 film MY SON JOHN has achieved notoriety as the most perverse and overly zealous of the Red Scare films of the McCarthy era. Dan and Lucille Jefferson (Dean Jagger and Helen Hayes) are a conservative religious couple who have raised three boys. Two are about to do their military service in Korea, and the third, John (Robert Walker, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN), works for the federal government in nearby Washington, DC. Making a surprise visit home, John and his parents are at odds: John's haughty intellectualism and progressive bent set him apart from his father's American Legion–loving views, while his mother, already in an anxious state, becomes further flustered about John's condescending attitudes toward what she considers matters of propriety — not least of all sex. Has their overeducated son fallen under the spell of Communism? DIR/SCR/PROD Leo McCarey; SCR Myles Connolly, John Lee Mahin. U.S., 1952, b&w, 122 min. NOT RATED

AFI Member passes accepted.