Four Sons

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Four Sons
Screenshot
Directed by	John Ford
Produced by	John Ford
Written by	Philip Klein I. A. R. Wylie
Starring	Margaret Mann James Hall Charles Morton Ralph Bushman George Meeker
Cinematography	Charles G. Clarke George Schneiderman
Editing by	Margaret Clancey
Distributed by	Fox Film
Release date(s)	February 12, 1928
Running time	100 min.
Country	US
Language	silent film English intertitles
IMDb profile

Four Sons is a 1928 silent drama film directed and produced by John Ford and written for the screen by Philip Klein from a story by I. A. R. Wylie. The film starred Margaret Mann, James Hall, and Charles Morton. John Wayne had an uncredited role as an extra.

1 Plot
2 Thematic overview
3 Cast
4 External links

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Mother Bernle is a widow in Bavaria with four sons: Franz, Johann, Andreas and Joseph.

Joseph receives a job offer from the United States, and he is given money to travel there by his mother.

The First World War is heating up. Franz, who is already serving in the German army, is joined by Johann and Andreas.

In America, Joseph has married and is running a delicatessen. when America enters the war, Joseph enlists to fight for the American side. This causes problems for Mother Bernle, who is shunned in her village.

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Thematic overview

When shooting Four Sons in the autumn of 1927, Ford decided to apply what he had absorbed in Berlin to a script whose German and American urban settings lent themselves to Murnau's tour-de-force style, compellingly on display in Sunrise. Murnau's city sets were re-used for the New York sequences in Four Sons, but more than that, Joseph Bernle's arrival in the city replicates that of the Man and Wife in the earlier film – including shots of static figures surrounded and momentarily masked from view by careening automobiles. The architectural details of the Bernle family's village are reminiscent of the bourgeois town in Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), as are the static, sentimental interior domestic tableaux which served as a relief from all the Gothic horror in the vampire classic. The most overtly expressionistic shot in Four Sons shows the postman's shadow delivering the black-bordered envelope announcing the battlefield deaths of two of the family's sons, Johann and Andre; Murnau perfected the use of the portentous shadow in Nosferatu. Finally, the tracking shots across the misty fields of battle duplicate those across the marshes in Sunrise – mapping, in both Murnau's and Ford's films, the mysterious space of personal crisis and a personal encounter with death or destruction.

The film also has significant political meaning with. For example the two vastly contrasting emotional close-ups of the bespectacled young man separated by six quick shots of Major Von Stomm (Earle Fox) hacking a black cat to death with his sabre; or the track in to the mouth of a trumpet followed by a quick dissolve into the horror-stricken open mouth of Frau Bernle (Margaret Mann), Ford is a able to generate a powerful critique of militarism as a means by which the ruling classes control and traumatise the people.