I'll Give My Life

Lutheran edification film about the religious missionary work of the Church. Jim (John Bryant, Strangers when we meet) is a brilliant graduate in architectural engineering from the Valparaiso Lutheran University in Indiana. His father John (Ray Collins, Touch of Evil, here for his last movie role), at the head of an important construction engineering company in Chicago with his associate Rex (Stuart Randall, Female on the Beach), wants to take him as junior partner. And fortunately Jim is in love with the charming company secretary Alice (Angie Dickinson, Ocean's Eleven), with the approval of John and Jim's mother Dora (Katherine Warren, The Caine Mutiny, final movie role here also).

But Jim has already another idea in mind "to make the best possible use of his life": he wants to attend the seminary to become a minister of the Church. Having got through his father's deception, Jim decides then to go abroad as a missionary: he got the idea during the war in the Pacific, when a GI, corporal Burr (Richard Benedict, Okinawa), told him that if religion "talks about helping people", then it should be done there in these devastated countries. He arrives so at Wapenamanda in the highlands of the Australian Territory of New Guinea, in order to bring the Gospel and build the Church of God in this "godforsaken place" full of "misery and cruelty", where people don't even know "the word hope". Kopa (Milton Woods, It happened in Harlem) becomes one of his first converts and then his medical orderly and interpreter.

Until which point will Jim have to "give his life"? Will Alice accept to finally join him in New Guinea? And will Jim find the strength and the people to go on with this ever "unfinished task"? This religious film, supervised by the advice of the reverend Herman W. Gockel of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (also first program director of the TV series This is the Life), makes the promotion of the Church work and praises for the necessity to be committed, according to Jesus's very own words, "to spread the Gospel until the ends of the earth".

This is not much of a film, but it is a good story. It is in fact just a story and nothing else, and the film just tells the story. The actors are well known from other films, mainly as supporting roles, like Ray Collins and Angie Dickinson, and they just do their job here. The story is interesting, because it happens to so many families. Ray Collins is a successful engineer with great enterprises, and his life's dream is that his only son will follow him in his footsteps and take over the firm. He doesn't. He chooses to become a minister instead, and what is worse, a missionary in New Guinea, an area well known for almost unavoidable infections of malaria, a damnation for life. The father just has to accept it and can do nothing about it but face the consequences, and here you are: the son is infected with serious fever in New Guinea and can't carry on his work but has to leave his task unfinished. The father's reaction to this is not convincing: He decides to fulfil his son's work but in his own way. Ray Collins was a great actor, he always made an impression although he never showed up except in minor roles, and this was one of his last more prominent roles. It's not a great film, it's like a novelletta, a magazine story, and the tragedy of the lost son could have been developed into an interesting drama. Instead it gets lost in sanctimony.

An obscure religious movie, funded by the Lutheran Church and not widely distributed back in 1960, has found a wider audience over the past five years via YouTube, and is worth checking out for a number of reasons.

As it unfolded, the film struck me as an interesting "answer" to Hollywood's famous adaptation of Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead". Instead of the heroic rugged individualist played by Gary Cooper, here we have a son (blandly portrayed by a miscast yet effective John Bryant), groomed to take part in his father's highly successful construction business, likely to inherit the patriarch's mantle. But his life was changed by the war (presumably the Korean War, as the movie's 1955 copyright suggests), and when he graduates from Valparaiso University (a Lutheran school) with an engineering degree his homecoming is upset by Bryant announcing that he's not joining dad's firm but instead enrolling at a seminary.

His goal is to be a missionary, and in a brief but potent "documentary" segment of the film, we see how Bryant's war experience and dealing with victims of war has developed a strong belief in pacifism. But his main call is to spread the word of Jesus.

With some preachiness (natch, given the subject matter), we see the result of his big decision, drastically disappointing dad Collins, who had his son's life all planned out, and surprising his girlfriend (Angie Dickinson, presumably very early in her career circa 1955, but a commanding screen presence even then -I oddly imagined she would have been a great choice to star in Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" in the 1960s had Hollywood been ready to film it!).

The movie follows his going to New Guinea with Angie as his wife after finishing his seminary education, and after his untimely death there how his dad finally sees the light and dedicates his own life to spreading the word of Christ.

This sort of movie is quite different from most Hollywood product, and apparently was not commercial, only getting released five years later, alternately titled "I'll Give My Life", in 1960 by Howco Intl. Pictures, a company associated with horror movies.

Ray Collins is looking forward to his son, John Bryant, graduating from engineering school. He expects to take him into his partnership. Bryant, however, says that he wants to become a minister. Despite his father's arguments, he does so, is sent as a missionary to New Guinea, and marries Angie Dickinson.

It's hard for me to determine the exact provenance of this movie, with its script by Herbert Moulton, but it's clearly intended as a call to dedication to Christian principles. Although the production looks like little more than a cheap TV drama, it has some impressive talent in its cast and crew. Moulton had whom two writing Oscars for short subjects; Collins, in his final big-screen role (although he would continue for the next five years in William Talman's futile quest to win a case against Raymond Burr's Perry Mason) is fine; Angie Dickinson is appropriately button-down for a minister's wife.

I have remarked in other reviews that faith is a closed book to me. However, I can recognize a well-told story. For those with a real Christian faith, this is a telling work.

This is the story of a father whose son chooses faith over the family fortune and business. The Son is a young, bright engineering graduate who now feels called to the ministry. Against his father's wishes he enrolls in the seminary. The movie reveals the passion and the sacrifice of men and women overseas serving as missionaries. It is about commitment, sacrifice, and love---a love that surpasses all human understanding.

This bit of drama that appears to be produced by a religious organization, shows you can tell a good story and get the point across with a low budget and simple script. The actors do a fine job and I almost didn't recognize Angie Dickinson. This last paragraph is mostly here because IMDb requires ten lines of text. God bless you.