Leo McCarey's My Son John (1952) and Auteur Theory and My Son John by James Morrison

The scene most often cited as the film's [My Son John] most embarrassing, when Dan conks John with the Bible, has never been earmarked by any critic as funny at all, never mind deliberately so.  But to a student of McCarey, the Laurel-and-Hardy reverb of the scene is unmistakable -- in its suddenness, in its disconnect between the extent of Dan's Hardy-like pique and the meagerness of his onset (a slightness punctuated by the comic-strip sound effect that accompanies the bop on the head), the little pause on the benumbed aftermath and the frozen double-takes of the stunned combatants, the mismatched cutting that render John's subsequent tumble over the table as pure surreal slapstick.
--James Morrison, Auteur Theory and My Son John (Bloomsbury, 2018)

One way to judge a book on film for me is whether it makes me want to see a film again, and after reading Morrison's book I took My Son John (now available on DVD) out of the library and found much truth in Morrison's book, which gives the history of the development of the auteur theory in France, England, the U.S and applies it to Leo McCarey's My Son John.  Much of what Morrison says is familiar to me as one who has watched and enjoyed McCarey's films for years but my experience of My Son John was distorted by the its anti-communist surface.   The film seen today has, however, little overt anti-communism and is mostly an Oedipal-influenced story about family and generational differences, similar in many ways and themes to McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (see my post of Dec 19, 2014) while still being as much a part of its time as Make Way for Tomorrow was (1937)

After John tumbled over the table he ripped his pants and had his mother Lucille (Helen Hayes) give the ripped pants to the church's clothing drive. Unfortunately he had left a key in the pocket, making his mother suspicious and taking it with her on a trip to Washington, where she found it fit the lock of one of John's female friends who had been arrested for spying.  Meanwhile the FBI has been interviewing John's father Dan (Dean Jagger)and mother, making vague suggestions questioning John's patriotism. When John realizes he is being investigated he makes plans to flee the country but gets killed first (presumably by his comrades) leaving a tape renouncing communism that is played at a college commencement where he was to receive an honorary award.

John's father is a dipsomaniac who is blindingly loyal to the U.S., often singing "if you don't like your uncle Sammy" (originally a WW I song, though Dan seems too young for WW I and too old for WWII) when he gets inebriated at American Legion meetings.  Lucille tries to understand John's sympathy for the oppressed while holding a Bible in one hand and a cookbook in the other, her claim that these are the only books she needs an implicit criticism of John's intellectual interests; meanwhile she is regularly given pills for her anxiety by the family doctor.  John's two brothers have just left for the Korean War, one of America's most unpopular wars, and John's interest in peace is seen by his father as a lack of support for them.  John pays a price for questioning the status quo and thinking for himself.