Four Men and a Prayer

It will take FOUR MEN AND A PRAYER to save an old colonel's reputation from disgrace.

Although its complicated plot is faintly ludicrous, this John Ford film offers plenty of action and some good acting to keep its viewers entertained. The production value is of a high order and there's a generous amount of heroics, which almost makes one forget that there's no really despicable villain to hiss.

Barrister George Sanders, diplomat Richard Greene, military pilot David Niven, and Oxford student William Henry are the English brothers who unite to find their father's murderer and clear his good name. All do a fine job with what the script gives them, constantly dashing about and acting terribly energetic, with young Henry more than keeping up with his three better known costars. Greene actually has top billing, but Niven gets the best lines, getting to leaven a good deal of humor into his performance.

Lovely Loretta Young does not fare so well. She's given the ridiculous role of a silly rich girl in love with Greene who follows him first from America to England, then on to Argentina and Egypt. Even witnessing a hideous massacre doesn't entirely sober her, as she begins to behave like a junior league Mata Hari to uncover information for the preternaturally patient Greene. One usually expects more than this from John Ford's heroines.

The rest of the large cast offers able support, however. Wonderful old Sir C. Aubrey Smith graces his brief role as the men's tragic father. Stalwart Reginald Denny plays a captain with too much information for his own good. Affable Alan Hale has fun with his role as a millionaire arms dealer. J. Edward Bromberg is a squalid little South American general and, in a tiny role, John Carradine plays his suave & dangerous enemy. Blustery Berton Churchill plays the powerful tycoon father of Miss Young's character, while bantam Barry Fitzgerald steals his few moments of screen time as a boisterous little Irishman ready for a good fight.

This movie was a well written adventure and suspense yarn with a very distinguished cast. However, I feel that the character played by Loretta Young was overemphasized. From the moment that she first enters the story she is in virtually every scene. After awhile it got a bit distracting. She played one of those "won't take no for an answer" types who always gets her way. Despite this annoying characterization, overall i enjoyed the film.

A lavish production, fast-paced direction, and some exciting action sequences tip the balance in favor of this basically juvenile derring-do in the spirit of GUNGA DIN. On the other hand, there is some offensive stereotyping, lots of flat dialogue, and cartoon-like conceptions of character. The four men are brothers, but act so naively that they seem like twelve-year olds: David Niven gets the brightest moments. While tracking down the enemies of their dear old Dad [the always magisterial C. Aubrey Smith], they are joined by spunky [verging on downright pushy] Loretta Young. She has one costume that can be described as the Grizzly Bear Dress, but she sports some nifty outfits too. They all rush around the globe chasing villains until Loretta's father, a kindly munitions tycoon, helps to resolve the mystery. A more accurate title might be FOUR FEATHERS MEET NANCY DREW.

Four brothers receive telegrams from their father, telling them he has been dishonourably discharged and bidding them meet him at their home. They arrive to learn that he has the evidence to prove he was framed in his court-martial, but before the end of the evening Father has been murdered in his locked study, and his papers stolen. The four brothers fan out across the globe in search of the four men their father mentioned who might be able to prove his innocence--sort of an inverted version of the Four Feathers.

The brothers, played by George Sanders, David Niven, William Henry, and Richard Greene (who, from a distance, looks oddly like Brendan Fraser), are staunch in support of their dishonored father (played by the only actor who could command unquestioning faith in his military honor: C. Aubrey Smith). In their travels, they are haunted by Greene's irritating American girlfriend, played by Loretta Young as not much more than a series of costume changes (she shows up in some of the oddest hats imaginable, and one fur-trimmed number that makes you wonder if she's a Plushy fetishist--she does make up for it, however, in a lovely gown-to-watch-revolutions-by). Perhaps her most far-fetched moment, however, is her light-hearted banter after an evening of watching a military massacre.

Along the way, the tone of the movie changes almost as often as Young's wardrobe. You think you're in a sort of amateur detective yarn, and suddenly you're watching innocent peasants mowed down by the military. The director, John Ford, is quoted in the AFI Catalog as having said, "I just didn't like the story, or anything about it, so it was a job of work." His lack of passion really shows.

But the chaotic story (filled with pointless red herrings, such as the role Young's father may or may not have played in the evil-doings) does have some wonderful light moments, most of them provided by Niven, who is just delightful throughout: conversing with a boat steward in Donald Duck voices, playing with rubber toys, mocking Henry's incipient whiskers, roughhousing with his brothers when they reunite on a boat dock. These touches make the film less painful than it would be otherwise. The wonderful George Sanders, however, is painfully underutilized.

A sort of independent spy thriller, John Ford's Four Men and a Prayer tells the story of four sons of a British colonel who investigate the circumstances around his dishonorable discharge and murder. It's got a great cast, globetrotting, and gun smugglers, but in the end I found the exercise a bit deflating overall. Some of the pieces were there, but so much was either missing or confused that the actual spy adventure parts of the film never really felt all that convincing or interesting.

The movie begins with the court martial of Colonel Loring Leigh (C. Aubrey Smith) in India. He's presented evidence against him for...something that led to some disaster, evidence brought by one of his junior officers. Dishonorably discharged and sent back to England, he sends telegrams to his four sons across the world to meet him at home. These are Geoffrey (Richard Greene), a British intelligence officer in Washington, Wyatt (George Sanders), an advocate in the British legal system, Christopher (David Nivens), a brash pilot with a few women vying for his attention, and Rodney (William Henry), a student at Oxford. The bulk of the beginning of the film is getting to know these four sons in their natural environments before they return home, feeling very much like brothers with long running inside jokes and little playful rivalries. This felt like a great start to a film that could go in really interesting directions.

However, things quickly just kind of begin sputtering. The Colonel, retiring to his room before dinner, is mysteriously shot. The captain from India they were bringing to help them begin to build a case dies in the car to the house, and the brothers have nothing but straws to reach for. Two go to South America and two go to India, both groups following trails that ultimately lead them back to Alexandria, Egypt. The weird thing about this is that both sides of the investigation end up finding pretty much the same clues leading up a chain of command in an arms dealing operation, most particularly the same model gun with the serial number chiseled off.

I think one of my big problems with this film is that the investigation never feels all that related to Colonel Leigh's original dishonorable discharge. His name gets brought up, but the brothers' investigation is about who's running this arms dealer organization, not really about clearing their father's name. There is one scene where the brothers in South America get the junior officer who testified against Colonel Leigh to admit he forged the document that got Colonel Leigh into hot water, but he's quickly assassinated by agents of the organization.

In reality, the whole film ends up feeling like a series of spy movie-like events, including the arms dealers giving unworking arms to a group of South American rebels right before the authorities show up and kill everyone, but nothing seems to connect to anything else. When they finally figure out who's on top of the whole shebang, it turns out the guy doesn't even know it. It's so weird.

What saves the movie from being a complete slog is the cast, in particular David Nevin and Loretta Young as Lynn Cherrington, Geoffrey's belle who follows him to South America and gets herself involved in the spy game. Niven is just a charming fellow even when getting wantonly embarrassed by the two women he's seeing at the same time at the beginning of the film, and he's always a joy to watch. Young is a bit of a spitfire, injecting herself where she has no business, and she's fun while she does it.

The movie ends on a heartwarming note, but the adventure up to that point has been so confused, repetitive, and weirdly built that it doesn't really register. The loose structure allows for some nice moments here and there, but it's far from enough to make the overall film worthwhile.