Makes Screen Hit When 60 years Old

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 418, 28 July 1928, Page 23

Makes Screen Hit When 60 years Old

Heroine of “Four Sons”

glorification of MOTHERHOOD

“Four Sons,” the John Ford picture, has developed an aged Cinderella in the interpreter of its central figure, Grandma Bernie, impersonated by Margaret Mann, who at 60 makes a sensational success.

For years she had been an extra woman, living from day to day on the precarious emoluments of the calling, which shunts its professors to the heights one day and drops them to the depths the next. Then John Ford saw her, and the future became rosy. Anyhow, in “Four Sons” she has her apotheosis, for it is the sanctification and the glorification of motherhood. Grandma Bernie is the ideal of motherhood, the woman sacrificing everything for her progeny. The picture was made by John Ford from a scenario based on I. A. R. Wylie’s magazine story “Grandma Bernie Learns Her Letters.” This story had to do with an emigrant woman who wanted to come into the United States to find her son, the only one of four left alive after the great war was over. Her experiences with the official immigration authorities at Ellis Island offer a lesson in stupidity. But after her many trials Grandma Bernie finds safe haven with her son. Mrs. Mann is the important factor in the picture. Others are James Hail, Francis X. Bushman, jun., Charles Morton, George Meeker, as the four sons of the picture’s title. Ruth Mix, daughter of the Western star; Albert Gran and June Collyer are others in the cast. Movietone accompaniment is part of the picture's attractiveness.