Four Men And A Prayer (1938)

When a British Indian Army colonel (C. Aubrey Smith) is dishonorably discharged he returns to London. His four sons - a barrister (George Sanders), an aviator (David Niven), an attache (Richard Greene) at the British Embassy in Washington DC and a student (William Henry) at Oxford - rally around to support him. But when he's murdered, the sons take it upon themselves to clear his name. Based on the novel by David Garth and directed by John Ford (THE SEARCHERS). One rarely sees this film brought up when discussing Ford's filmography and one can see why. With the exception of one sequence, there's not much Fordian about it. The one sequence which is typically Ford is a brawl in a bar, this time Barry Fitzgerald is the Irishman who starts it rather than Ford regular Victor McLaglen. The rest of the movie is entertaining enough with some shade thrown on gun manufacturers for taking no responsibility for how guns are used (there's a massacre of Argentinean peasants and revolutionaries). For awhile, I thought the top billed leading lady (Loretta Young) was superfluous but she proves an very important character in the second half of the film. With John Sutton, Reginald Denny, John Carradine and Cecil Cunningham.