TCM will run 'My Son John' January 27, 2010

Contrary to the title of another thread hereabouts, TCM will premiere My Son John on Wednesday, January 27, 2010, at 8:00 PM (EST). The movie will run as part of the network's "Shadows of Russia" spotlight that month, a variety of films depicting the various ways the Soviet Union and Communism were dealt with in American films over the years (The North Star, Mission to Moscow, I Was a Communist for the F.B.I., etc., etc.) Sounds cool.

Save for a single network broadcast (I think on ABC) in the late 1960s, My Son John has virtually never aired, certainly not in recent years. TCM's showing of this odd and often absurd movie, by the McCarthyite, pro-HUAC, blacklist-supporting director Leo McCarey, is not to be missed.

It's also a chance to see the very bad ways in which the late Robert Walker, who had done so many better pictures, was "inserted" into the film by producer-director McCarey, after Walker's sudden death in mid-production, by McCarey's use of outcrops from Walker's last completed movie, Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train...the movie this excellent actor should and will be best remembered for. Pretty ghoulish, in addition to being technically ham-handed. (Because of Walker's passing, McCarey also had to change the ending, to an absolutely preposterous one.)

Anyway, not to be missed.