FOUR MEN AND A PRAYER: a prayer won't cut it, this film needs divine intervention!

This 1938 misfire from the usually dependable John Ford is best enjoyed if viewed as a live-action cartoon rather than the adventure mystery it's intended to be.
I found that watching it as if it were a big budget condensed version of one of those Saturday morning serials put out by Republic in the 1930s and 40s made it easier to tolerate the caricature characters, ethnic stereotypes and ridiculous plot.
A very young David Niven, George Sanders, Richard Greene and William Henry are the titular four men although, in truth, Greene looks so young that Three Men and a Youth might be a more honest title. He looks even younger than Henry who's playing his kid brother, and certainly not old enough to have obtained employment as a diplomat at the British Embassy in Washington DC. As for saddling him with responsibility for playing Loretta Young's love interest, let's just say 'Three Men, a Youth, and a Cradle Snatcher' would have made for an even more honest title. Miss Young's game attempts to appear besotted by Greene's pre-manly charms are considerably less than convincing.
Other than servicing 20th Century Fox's efforts to build Greene as a romantic leading man, she's pretty much superfluous to the story. She's not even effective as the love interest since Greene's character spends most of the movie rebuffing her amorous advances with the intensity of a 19th
century student at Oxford whose stroll to the crease, cricket bat in hand, is interrupted by a flighty young thing wanting to give him a kiss for luck.
The film starts out promisingly enough, with the court martial of Colonel Loring Leigh of the British Indian Army for a military blunder that's cost the lives of 90 soldiers. As Leigh is played by

C.Aubrey Smith he obviously can't be guilty. With his ramrod posture, stiff upper lip and British integrity oozing from every pore, Smith only ever portrayed characters of the highest moral fibre, so clearly there's something fishy going on. When, shortly afterwards he's found dead from an apparent suicide it's left to his four sons to solve the mystery and clear his name.
Which is where it all starts getting very silly and slapdash.
The sons split up to search for witnesses, with two heading back to India and the other two taking the boat to South America. Now 1930s Hollywood was never going to win any awards for accuracy in its representation of other countries and other cultures, but the stereotyping here is particularly lazy and offensive. According to 20th Century Fox's worldview, India and South America are indistinguishable from North Africa and both are peopled entirely by swarthy, shifty, pidgin-English speaking natives harboring murderous intentions towards the white man.

Naturally, Sanders, Niven, Greene and Henry, being products of the British Empire, have no truck with such misguided prejudices and simply breeze through everything the locals can throw or fire at them while barely raising a sweat.  Their simplistic, faulty and primitive powers of detection and logic are blithely overlooked in the interests of moving them onward through one implausible scenario after another to the inevitable conclusion.
FOUR MEN AND A PRAYER is so bad it's enough to make one reassess Ford's standing as a legendary director. It doesn't do anything for the reputation of his cast either. Sanders gives no indication of the talent that was about to make him a star, Young is just embarrassing, Greene's shortcomings have already been discussed, and it's just bizarre watching Niven mugging away as the dimwitted comic relief. Who would have pegged him as a romantic leading man after a performance like that?   At least Smith had the good sense to die 15 minutes into the story and minimise his involvement with the whole misguided affair.
To put it kindly, the whole thing is a mess, a sloppy, contrived, cliched and disjointed mess completely lacking in the self-awareness to recognise its own awfulness.