The New Pictures

My Son, John (Paramount) casts Robert Walker as a U.S. Government employee who is also a Communist Party member. Robert associates with "highbrow professors" and has rather vague political arguments with his American Legionnaire father (Dean Jagger), but his mother (Helen Hayes) adores and defends him. When she accidentally discovers a key in Robert's pocket that leads to the apartment of a suspected Communist girl spy, she decides to cooperate with FBI Man Van Heflin in bringing her son to justice. At that point, Robert, about to fly to Lisbon, has an abrupt change of political heart. While trying to get to the FBI, he is shot by fellow Communists in a wild auto chase through the capital, and dies on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A confession he recorded before his death* is played' back as the commencement address he was to have delivered at his alma mater. In it, he admits to having been "an enemy of my country--and the servant of a foreign power," and urges the graduates to "hold fast to honor."

My Son, John dramatizes a theme of front-page importance. Unfortunately, its subject is relegated to the more colorful but less newsworthy show-business section. The complex dramatic material is reduced to simple melodramatics and, in Leo McCarey's plodding direction of a muddled and maudlin screenplay, the picture has not much to offer either politically or cinematically.

Helen Hayes brings a large talent to her first film role in 17 years--since Vanessa: Her Love Story. But she appears somewhat nonplussed by the hysterical scene in which she cheers her son on to emulate his two football-playing G.I. brothers and ''get in this game ... on God's side and . . carry the ball . . . before the clock runs out." Dean Jagger, as the small-town schoolteacher father "who thinks with his heart," is required at one point to hit his son over the head with a Bible. About the only person in the picture who acts with much sense is Van Heflin as the FBI man.

*Actor Walker recorded the speech for the picture two days before his death last August at the ge of 32. The film's few unfinished scenes were completed with a double for Walker and screen lips from his previous picture, Strangers on a Train.

With a Song in My Heart (20th Century-Hox) derives its drama from the gallant, real-life story of Singing-Star Jane Froman.-Unfortunately, the picture is less inspiring than its theme. Producer Lamar Trotti's screenplay is larded over with sentimentality, and Jane Froman's toughly courageous story emerges on the screen as the_ sort of life she might have led if Technicolor cameras had been looking on.

David Wayne plays Songstress Froman's first husband, Don Ross, and Rory Calhoun is cast as John Burns, the Lisbon Clipper copilot who rescued her from the Tagus River after the crash and later married her. As a sort of composite of all nurses, Thelma Ritter plays a hardbitten, bighearted girl from Flatbush. Red-haired Susan Hayward, in the leading role, con vincingly matches her on-screen lip move ments to brunette Jane Froman's warm, vivacious singing voice on the sound track.

When it falters dramatically, With a Song in My Heart manages to give itself a lift musically with such songs as Blue Moon, Tea for Two, Embraceable You, and an Americana medley of eleven tunes, rang ing from California, Here I Come to Deep in the Heart of Texas.

Encore (Rank; Paramount] brings Somerset (Trio, Quartet) Maugham back for a merited cinematic reprise with an ex pertly packaged omnibus of three enter taining short stories: i ) The ironic Ant and the Grasshopper, in which a ne'er-do-well playboy (Nigel Patrick) marries the third richest girl in the world, buys back the family estate his hard-working brother (Roland Culver) had been forced to sell, repays Culver the -L-1.300 he had borrowed, and at the last minute, true to form, cadges a fiver from him. Typical tongue-in-camera sequence: the elegant playboy, to shame his brother into giving him money, goes to work as a doorman at his club, a bartender at his favorite restaurant, a window washer at his office.

2) The philosophical Winter Cruise, in which a ship's captain assigns a handsome young French steward to make love to a garrulous, middle-aged spinster (Kay Walsh) in order to stop her from talking. The spinster gives everyone a lesson in humility when she lets on at the last that she was aware of the dodge all along. In Kay Walsh's eloquent performance, the vignette has both pathos and point.

3) The dramatic Gigolo and Gigolette, in which a high-diver (Glynis Johns) plans to commit suicide because she thinks her husband no longer loves her. Reassured of his affection, she safely makes the 80-ft. leap into a five-foot tank of flaming water while morbid Riviera spectators look on.

Encore has polished acting, direction and writing by three different sets of Brit. ish film talents. But the real star of the picture is that skilled old party, Somerset Maugham, who is seen in the garden of his Cote d'Azur villa as he introduces each of the stories. Author Maugham's latest screen encore serves as a reminder to epic-sated moviegoers that good things often come in small packages.

-On her way to entertain servicemen overseas Songstress Froman suffered near-fatal injuries in a 1943 Lisbon Clipper crash. Two years later, after 14 operations, she returned to Europe propped on crutches and toured more than 30,000 miles to sing for wounded G.I.s.

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