Four Sons

“Big as the Heart of Humanity!”

In a Bavarian village, a widow named Mother Bernle (Margaret Mann) has four grown sons, and the first war pulls three of them into the German army. John Ford follows the family through the silent-era years of the war, when the fourth son, Joseph (James Hall), leaves for America, the country Germany will soon fight. What the film keeps coming back to is how little a mother can do when her sons end up on opposite sides of a border.