I'll Give My Life (1960) User Reviews

I do the work before the night comes

[bkoganbing · 6/10 · 18 June 2014]

Produced by the Lutheran Missouri Synod I'll Give My Life plays like an expanded version of one of their television episodes of This Is The Life which was a long running television series with religious dramas. It's a sincere effort helped in large part by the professional cast of familiar faces.

Ray Collins plays the head of a successful engineering firm who has hopes that his son John Bryant will join him in the firm. But Collins gets the shock of his life when Bryant tells him after war service he wants to go to the seminary and become a minister. Later on he tells him he wants to become a missionary and gets an assignment in New Guinea. Even worse Collins's secretary Angie Dickinson quits and marries Bryant and they start a family in New Guinea.

The film is played out over the course of the next ten or so years and it goes through the trials and heartaches and tragedies of what happens and what can happen to missionaries. Of course the film takes the position that the work is worth it and has to be done before night comes in the biblical sense.

Religious folks will find this an inspiring film and it truly is a well made film with a simple and powerful message.

Long-lost Angie Dickinson picture well worth a look.

[bhkhannan · 6/10 · 19 February 2023]

Long-lost Angie Dickinson number. Almost unrecognisable as a brunette. She carries much of the emotional weight of this tale about an outsider rejecting a chosen career. Hollywood pictures about creative outsiders such as artists and writers rely on charismatic actors - Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life (1956), Charlton Heston in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) - to bring the project to life. Similarly, you might think, in movies about another type of outsider, of the religious variety, having the likes of Gregory Peck (The Keys of the Kingdom, 1944) or Bing Crosby in Going My Way (1944) goes a long way to giving such ventures audience-appeal.

Here, Jim (John Bryant), the son of a successful construction tycoon, having completed a degree goes against the wishes of father John (Ray Collins) by becoming a minister instead. In due course he is sent overseas to a mission in New Guinea, and like Father Stu (2022) contracts a deadly disease. Jim is far from charismatic, just a plodding ordinary guy who has found "something more important than building skyscrapers." The story is instead told through the eyes of John, resentful of his son's decision, and his girlfriend/fiancée/wife Alice (Angie Dickinson) who, expecting marriage to a wealthy engineer, instead has to set aside her own ambitions and go along with her husband's wishes, this being post-war America, and independence hardly a prerequisite in a wife, never mind a woman.

But if this is a story of a conversion - as was the case in Father Stu - it's about the conversion of the father and Alice and the bulk of the story hinges upon their reactions to the path taken by Jim rather than him taking center stage. So it's cleverly done, and whether this is due to budgetary pressure, or creative decision, it proves the right choice. John is the kind of self-made man who would dominate any stage, forever making plans, spinning the world as he would like it to be. In Alice's eyes we see nothing but her weighing up Jim's choices, sometimes accompanied by shock, occasionally elation, but mostly resignation and infrequent resentment as she, too, is parted from family to follow her husband into an unknown in which she had considerably less faith.

Unlike Father Stu, conversion does not come easily. Jim is long dead, two-thirds of the way through the picture as it happens, before John comes to realize that his son's death should not be in vain and that he left behind "an unfinished task" for his father to complete, namely raising awareness of the power of missionaries to improve the lot of the miserable and poor in foreign parts. Bear in mind the era in which this was made, so there are some attitudes that will make you wince, but generally it is well done, not weighted down with platitudes and, in concentrating on the doubter, brings alive a difficult subject.

And although this was before questions were asked about the sexual corruption of priests and ministers, men who followed religion were not as easily accommodated in the general community, seen as overly pious and, to the businessman, existing in a vacuum. The idea that the Church, of various kinds, has not done enough to ease global suffering, is continually raised and nobody here is giving themselves a pat on the back.

Alice is actually given more screen time than Jim, his father using her as a sounding board, and, while Jim is off in New Guinea, enjoying herself with the firm's resident beau, Bob (Jon Sheppod), and finally taking on motherhood and coping with the premature death of her husband and still fighting to open the father's eyes to the good being done.

Angie Dickinson (Jessica, 1962) gives a very good account of herself, especially as the narrative restricts her to the kind of wifely 1950s role rather than the spunky independent sexually aware character she portrayed in the 1960s. Her acting skill saved her from being lumbered with portentous dialogue since she could portray her feelings more easily with her eyes.

Ray Collins (famed for a running role in the Perry Mason series) is excellent as the father confused by his son's decision, fighting him every inch of the way. John Bryant (The Bat, 1959), it has to be said, does not light up the screen, lacking the magnetism of a Peck or a Crosby but in some regard this kind of straight playing suits the film, since the character is not meant to be out of the ordinary.

William F. Claxton (Desire in the Dust, 1960) directed from a script by Herbert Moulton, better known as a producer of shorts. Although this film was released in 1960, it appears to have been made before that, some suggest as early as 1955. Given it was funded by the Lutheran Church, the script does not make heavy weather of the religious elements and John's resistance to his son's vocation reflected that of any father to a son embarking on as shaky a career as painting or writing.

The Missionary's Father

[boblipton · 6/10 · 16 November 2018]

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.

Inspirational

[lor_ · 10 April 2024]

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.

A proud father and his fallen son

[clanciai · 7/10 · 6 December 2022]

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.

Spreading God's Love

[bubbarian · 8/10 · 21 September 2007]

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.