F. W. Murnau’s 1927 masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans made an enormous impression on everyone in Hollywood. En route to visit Murnau in Germany, Ford gave an interview to the “Moving Picture World”, which reported, “After seeing rushes of Sunrise, Ford declared that he believed it to be the greatest picture that has been produced. Ford said he doubts whether a greater picture will be made in the next ten years.” Ford’s overt, even slavish, Murnau imitation, filmed in 1927 and released early the following year with a musical score and synchronized sound effects, was titled Four Sons. Sumptuously photographed by George Schneiderman and Charles G. Clarke, with frequent use of the moving camera, Four Sons made its stylistic homage to Murnau even more explicit by dealing with the travails of a German family decimated by the horrors of the Great War. Ford considered Four Sons the “first really good story” he ever filmed (the source was a “Saturday Evening Post” short story by I. A. R. [Ida Alexa Ross] Wylie, who also provided the source material for his 1933 Pilgrimage). Four Sons deals with a Bavarian mother (Margaret Mann) who comes to America after three of her sons are killed in combat. Ford goes from a broadly comedic, operetta-like rendition of village life before the war to a nightmarish, extravagantly stylized scene of death on a fog-shrouded battlefield. The director effectively conveys the poignancy of an ordinary woman being buffeted about by world events beyond her control, but the film’s visual extravagance sometimes overwhelms the emotional simplicity of the story, its chracteristically Fordian situation of an Old World family being torn apart and reconstituted in a new land. (from Searching for John Ford)