FOUR SONS (1928)
Starring: Margaret Mann, James Hall, Charles Morton, Francis X Bushman Jr, George Meeker, June Collyer, Earle Foxe, Albert Gran, Frank Reicher, Archduke Leopold of Austria, Ferdinand Schumann-Heink, Jack Pennick
Writer: Philip Klein (based on the story "Grandmother Bernle Learns Her Letters" by I.A.R. Wylie)
Cinematography: George Schneiderman, Charles G Clarke
Editor: Margaret Clancey
Music: Christopher Caliendo (modern score, replacing original music and effects)
B&W, 1h 40m. 1.20:1 presentation.
Released on: February 13, 1928 by Fox Film Corporation
My experience: Ford at Fox DVD box set
There would be a few more clunkers going forward, but this, to me, is where John Ford really started to come into his own as a film director. He takes a very simple story, imbues it with a sense of nostalgia and foreboding, and more than a touch of sentimentality, and comes up with something that almost transcends the time in which it was filmed. While set in the years before and after (and including) World War I, its themes are unfortunately very much relevant today.
Mother Bernle (Margaret Mann) is a widow living in the German village of Burgerdorf, in Bavaria. Her four sons are all distinct personalities: Franz (Francis X Bushman Jr) is a gung-ho cadet in the military; Joseph (James Hall) is an affable country farmer; Johann (Charles Morton) is a steelworker; and Andreas (George Meeker), the youngest, is a shy homebody who spends his time shepherding in the fields.
The film opens up with the whole village getting together to celebrate the birthday of Mother Bernle. The village is a close-knit community, with everyone supporting and getting along with each other, including the postman (Albert Gran), the schoolmaster (Frank Reicher) and the burgomeister (August Tollaire). The balance starts shifting when the sadistic Major von Stomm (Earle Foxe) is posted to the town. On his first day he takes offense to some straw falling on him from atop Joseph's cart, and physically vents his anger on the young man.
World War I breaks out in the fall of 1914, and all the men in the village are expected to join the army to fight for the fatherland. While Andreas is still too young to serve, Franz and Johann do their bit for the cause, but Joseph refuses to follow von Stromm's orders and immigrates to America. He makes a success of himself in the new world, founding a German delicatessen and soon finding a wife and business partner in Annabelle (June Collyer). When America enters the war in the spring of 1917, Joseph and his friend, an iceman (played by Jack Pennick) join the US army.
After the war, Mother Bernle is invited by Joseph to come live with him in America, but the old woman is illiterate and must learn her letters in order to pass through Ellis Island. The villagers of Burgerdorf help her prepare, and farewells are said at the train station. Once on the continent, however, difficulties arise which force Mother Bernle to stay the night in Ellis Island. The matriarch escapes and finds herself wandering a huge, strange city trying to find Joseph. Her son, meanwhile, is frantically combing the city trying to find her after the authorities inform her she has escaped. All's well that ends well, however (this being a Hollywood movie, after all), and the film ends on a lovely image of grandmother and grandchild sleeping in a chair.
In Four Sons, we are immediately thrust into a wonderful, picturesque Hollywood "Old World" set that really places you firmly in the world it is attempting to create. The characters and setting are stereotypes, to be sure, but everything is (at first) utterly charming. The fhirtatious, charmingly bucolic postman played by Albert Graf, along with the schoolmaster and the burgomeister, act as a stand-in for the entire village. The postman in particular echoes the darkness and loss of innocence that war brings, going from a over-the-top grandiose personality who finds the utmost joy in bringing his fellow villagers letters from afar to, at war's end, a hunched-over, deeply traumatized harbinger of death (there is a wonderfully expressionistic shot of the postman's shadow against the wall, stretching a trembling hand carrying a letter across its surface, a shot which carries a distinct reminiscence of Murnau's 1922 horror classic Nosferatu).
Ford uses the interplay of light and shadow extraordinarily in Four Sons, which makes sense as much of the film takes place in Germany, which was the birth of expressionist film. A few examples: Mother Bernle blesses her sons before they go off to war, but it is filmed in such a way that the shadow of her hand lies heavy on their faces, like a harbinger of doom. As the troops march off to war down the village's main street, the tombstones of the local cemetery are foregrounded. After a character dies in the war, a member of their family sits in their bedroom on one of their beds, as the sun shines in an almost religious way on the place they once slept and never will again -- God's light calling them up to Heaven?
There is an amazing double exposure shot in which Mother Bernle, whose children have either immigrated or gone off to war, is by herself making a dinner and we (and Mother Bernle herself) see her four sons sitting around the dinner table eating, as if they were ghostly visions. And lastly, less expressionistic but no less effective, after the postman delivers some unwanted news, there is a shot of him standing by the river, with the church reflected upside down in the water (symbolizing the overturning of goodness and virtue). He throws a rock and it violently shatters the tranquility of the placid waters, in a visual renunciation of God.
There are countless other shots that remain firmly etched in the memory: a medium close-up of Mother Bernle's hand on a train window before it departs carrying her sons away; a shot in which Johann dips some molten metal into a barrel of water, seemingly filmed from under the surface; and a simple yet devastating shot while silently comments on the destruction war brings, in which, directly after the armistice is announced, some returning veterans file into a church, visibly disabled: the blind, the ones who have lost limbs. It's a static shot, filmed from afar, but oh so heartrending.
Unlike later in his career, here Ford experiments with the moving camera, as there are plenty of dollies and tracking shots, including a couple of "how did they ever do that" scenes filmed amongst a throng of people at the railway station. This film feels alive in every way, something that wasn't always the case in late 1920s Hollywood cinema.
My one complaint would be about one scene set on the battlefield, in which two characters meet in a foxhole. It's a moving scene, and filmed beautifully, but the situation in which it happens beggars belief. It's the only false note the film hit for me. The performances were solid, and even though the characters were pretty much stereotypes (the villain hacks at a cat with his sword, for goodness sake), and there's not much character development, this is not the type of film that screams for such a treatment.
If you're looking for an old-fashioned wartime melodrama that tugs at your heartstrings, you would be hard pressed to find much better than Four Sons.
Nine sentimental siblings out of ten.
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