A huge, huge hit in 1928 and the winner of the Photoplay Medal of Honor (a fan-chosen award that was very big then), this soap opera actually offers little that you wouldn't have seen in an earlier and more powerful hit, The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. (Except the village sets-- you saw those in Sunrise.) It's a similar saga about a family whose members wind up on opposite sides of the big war (WWI); only after the war ends does the story take a new direction, when the mother comes to America to visit the son who moved there. These scenes, though somewhat manipulative (the mom gets lost at Ellis Island and winds up on a subway car in the city-- a neat trick if it didn't involve ever being on a boat), are the most moving parts of the movie.
