Gentlemen,
Not having seen My Son John, I give it a rating of 10, based purely on suspicious ignorance.
I am suspicious of the criticisms.
One reviewer here says that the film is directed against those who would overthrow American middle class life, which is a strange trivialization of the animus informing Stalinist Communism, a political reality that had already murdered some 53 million people by the time My Son John was made -- the figure given by demographer Grigory Dyadkin in his Unnatural Death in the Soviet Union, 1928 - 1953.
Many of the reviewers appear to agree that this film as well as flagrant anti-Stalinism is bad, bad, bad, though they split a bit on the quality of the performances. One contributor attacks the entire career of Helen Hayes and has her at the nadir of her non-art in the film under discussion; another reviewer gives her performance a grudging nod. Same with Dean Jagger.
I suspect that the film is a good deal better than the politically motivated reviewers on this forum would have us believe. But even if the film stands out for its odoriferous fumes in a vat of year-old flounders, I don't care for the assumptions of several of the critics.
The truth is that although Hollywood has handled nazism well, it has never come to grips with the phenomenon of Stalinism -- its enormous death camps, its man-made famines, its surreal rendering of reality to a captive population. Some Jewish writers bemoan that the Holocaust has had no Solzhenitsyn to tell the story as he did of the Soviet camps across the three volumes and 2,000 pages that is the horror and gore of The Gulag Archipelago. The other side of the coin is that Hollywood has never attempted to render Stalinism and its mega-murder to a Western audience.
There is no film about Darkness at Noon; no dramatization of The Long Walk; no attempt to capture the despair of Kolyma Tales.
Let me suggest that a Hollywood producer might be able to make something of Viktor Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom. There is scope in the work for epic and plenty of pathos. It might work commercially.
Yours, Larry Parr Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia