Four Sons

                 

One of John Ford's alleged flaws as a director, cited by such titans as Manny Farber and Satyajit Ray among others, is his over reliance on sentimentality. It's my view that many of Ford's great films are such dark tragedies that they need expressions of sentiment as a counterweight to dispel monotony and morbidity. If you strip How Green Was My Valley, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence of anything cloying, you would be left with bleak, despairing pictures that would hold no solace for the viewer. Similarly, Ford's broad humor, a critical bugaboo since the Second World War, works to humanize such doom laden creations as The Searchers, The Wings of Eagles, and Cheyenne Autumn.

When confronting Four Sons, released in 1928, one is tempted to exclaim as Orson Welles, one of Ford's more fervent admirers, once did regarding Ford's occasional mawkishness, "Mother Machree!" Four Sons epitomizes sentimental Victorian mother love as three of the four sons (spoiler alert) expire while serving Germany during the Great War. Four Sons is part of a cycle of films (and literature like All Quiet on the Western Front and Le feu) that began with Gance's J'accuse, peaked with Vidor's The Big Parade, and ended with Renoir's The Grand Illusion; a film that Ford pondered remaking. What these films all shared was a revulsion towards the horror of World War 1 and a leftist humanism that stressed commonality amongst people in lieu of nationalist fervor. 

The son of Irish immigrants, Ford, because of his association with John Wayne, is largely perceived as a reactionary nationalist. Nothing could be further from the truth, Ford identified as a leftist before World War 2 and even his more nostalgic work afterwards are, as Tag Gallagher has noted, "scathing denunciations" of American racism, classism, and imperialism. Four Sons' opening sequences paint pre-war Bavaria in sweet tones because Ford wanted this period to be viewed as an idyll before the devastation of war. The boisterous nostalgia of these sequences is a counterweight to the sense of loss and waste that dominates the second half of the picture.

Four Sons is not top rank Ford, but it is a very effective picture. A monocled Prussian officer who functions as the villain seems extraneous, a cliché of the times. The acting is generally above average and Ford regular Jack Pennick is a welcome sight. Ford was very much under the sway of German expressionism, particularly Murnau, and was still evolving his own style. A good comparison would be his stronger 1931 effort, Pilgrimage, a film with similar themes. Ford only really started to flower with his trio of Will Rogers pictures. Perhaps the best recommendation I can give is to say that Four Sons made my wife cry and she is a tough minded viewer.