FOUR SONS

Four Sons tells the story of a Bavarian mother (Margaret Mann) who arrives in America after the battlefield deaths of her three sons, moving from a comic description of pre-war provincial life to the nightmare of massacres on a fog-shrouded battlefield.

John Ford, drawing on Murnau’s Sunrise : A Song of Two Humans, effectively handles the drama of a simple woman swept up in the events of an era.

The photography by George Schneiderman and Charles G. Clarke’s cinematography is splendid, making the stylistic homage to Murnau even more explicit in its evocation of the suffering of a German family decimated by the horrors of the Great War.