DivX Clásico

Here's one of the greatest American films.

Unfortunately, it only seems to circulate in lousy VHS copies. This one is taken from a PAL VHS source with occasional tracking problems. However, as a reference copy for study you could probably do worse.

I truly wish there was a better version out there; if you know of one, let me know.

There are color bars at the beginning and a minute or two of gray leeder at the end. I'm not sure yet how to edit this type of stuff out, so apologies for the minor annoyance of having these included.

Elliott Stein in the Village Voice: "By the early 1950s, McCarey had become a raging rightist and active member of the Society for the Preservation of American Ideals. In his most problematic film, My Son John (1951), a small-town couple is shattered by the revelation that their son is a Commie agent. Some of this picture's gruesome peculiarity stems from the fact that Robert Walker, who appears in the title role, died suddenly before production was completed; the actor's death scene was patched together from shots "borrowed" from his death scene in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, made a year earlier. The confrontational ruckuses are charged with lunatic weirdness—for starters, redneck dad smacking Red-agent son on the head with the family Bible. Whatever it thinks it's saying, My Son John has more to say about American '50s hysteria than any other film ever made."

"What is most sadly ironic about My Son John is that its nauseatingly McCarthyist second half perversely contradicts all the valid points made earlier, thus retroactively invalidating some 60 minutes of what comes close to being McCarey's best work of writing and direction... Because of their negative reaction to the film's reactionary message, most critics have been unable to acknowledge the subtle beauty of the first part..." - Jean-Pierre Coursodon, American Directors

File Size: 969.24
Runtime: 2:00:08

Video codec: DivX 6.0
Frame size: 624 x 480
FPS: 23.98
Data Rate: 1116.58 kbits/sec

Audio: MPEG Layer 3, Stereo, 44.100 kHz

My son John (Leo McCarey, 1952) VHSRip VO.avi