"Four Sons", 1940 Archie Mayo (Fox)

[Belle]

I just watched this beautiful restoration of the second incarnation of "Four Sons" - the first in 1928 by John Ford (one of the few silents of this director to have survived). Ford's film is set in Bavaria in WW1 and Mayo's film was set in WW2 and provided an ideal vehicle for propaganda, despite its inherently understated dramatization.

Set in 1936 on the Czech/German border, "Four Sons" is about how ideology tears a family apart with deadly consequences. The story is prescient in that the writer/s already seemed to know the outcomes of the Third Reich - consequences already felt by 1936 in the totalitarian state; indoctrination of children, cultural revisionism, cancellation (non-personhood), enforced conformity, the sense of righteous moral good everybody needs to heed - with the inevitable enforcement through violence. It has horrible overtones for the modern world in our so-called democracies. We are moving towards the abyss, thinking we're better people and that this could never happen to us!! There were gulls then just as there are gulls today.

Some things to say specifically about this production of 'Four Sons'. Firstly, it was filmed on a soundstage and, were it not for the artistry of Leon Shamroy and his magnificent lighting cinematography, the film might have felt more claustrophobic. (Perhaps it's really an ideal metaphor for the concerns of the film.) Eugenie Leontovich is simply stunning as the mother. Don Ameche is rather wooden (as usual) but this suits the often lugubrious tone of this film. A very assured production from Archie Mayo; though some set pieces are too static, at other times one is profoundly moved by the simplicity. The scene with the mother at the empty dinner table, followed by superimpositions of her absent sons, is reminiscent of the closing scene of Louis Milestone's "All Quiet on the Western Front" - just ten years earlier - and, of course, Ford was himself to use the dinner table to great dramatic effect in his films, as the locus of family life, in "How Green Was My Valley" (1941) and, later, "The Searchers". This scene has its own beautiful, internal rhythm and cadence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn-0LOPnQNw

As the mother of 3 adult sons and 3 grandsons myself I felt keenly for the central character and her losses, which are handled with subtlety, inevitability and grace. Dvorak's "Songs My Mother Taught Me" is right there from the beginning of the film and the national anthem which ends the film was the clarion call for contemporary audiences of the day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFcFyULoF0Q