Four Sons (1928)

 
BACKGROUND
 
The impact of F.W. Murnau's Sunrise on Hollywood in the 1920s was unprecedented by all accounts and that influence was felt in Ford’s work more than most. Four Sons, was in a sense Ford’s cinematic response to Murnau’s masterpiece. Ford’s depiction of German folk culture was made even more deferential by the fact that he shot on leftover sets from Sunrise. Yet despite Murnau’s influence the two films have distinctly different tones.  

Sunrise is self-consciously expressionistic and Foreboding while Four Sons is somewhat more classically composed and rife with elegiac warmth for its characters. Joseph McBride may have considered Four Sons: “The one time he [Ford] tried to be someone else” yet that honor might be more accurately applied to The Whole Town’s Talking, When Willie Comes Marching Home and Gideon’s Day which seem to imitate Frank Capra, Preston Sturges and British television. Four Sons has Murnau’s compositional richness yet is free of his harsh cynicism about human nature. Ford preferred to explore the pain and suffering of life as exaggerated among the wounded elite which he counterpointed with the persistence and decency of the working class. By expressing his disgust with the fascist mind-set that had been escalating for six years, Ford, like many artists, seemed to be pushed closer to the core of his over-arching artistic statement.  

Although Ford drew on many sources and adopted many styles, it was because he was always unequivocally himself, unable to be anything else, the mark of a true individualist who can afford to imitate without the risk of becoming derivative. Even more than Sunrise, Four Sons seems to be more closely modeled after Murnau’s 1924 The Last Laugh, one of the German director’s most heart-felt films, in which the main character is a doorman who bears a striking resemblance to Ford’s postman.  

PLOT SUMMARY

A family saga in which a Bavarian widow's three sons go to war for Germany while the fourth goes to America and winds up fighting on the other side.