THE UNFINISHED TASK/ I'LL GIVE MY LIFE

US, 1960, 78 minutes, Black-and-white.
Ray Collins, John Bryant, Angie Dickinson, Katherine Warren, Donald Woods.
Directed by William F.Claxton.

In view of the popularity of faith-based films after the commercial success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ in 2004, this film is worth looking at, an example of faith-based filmmaking at the end of the 1950s.

In fact, most of the screenplay could be adapted for a 21st-century version, substituting Iraq or Afghanistan for World War II experiences. (However, there is a lot of patronising talk about the savages of New Guinea, their past, cultures, the impact of the coming of Christianity.)

Ray Collins plays a very successful engineer who has planned for his son, John, to come into the business with him, assuming that this is what his son wants. However, at his graduation party, the son reveals to Alice, the company secretary with whom he is in love, a rather sweetness and light performance by Angie Dickinson who had just made Rio Bravo and was to move into 1960s stardom, that he plans to study for the ministry. (The film was produced by the Lutheran Board of Missouri.)

Needless to say, the father is very upset, the mother more supportive. The years pass as their son studies for the ministry and then shocks his family by telling them he wants to go to a missionary in New Guinea. Alice does not go with him. A college friend becomes part of the company and begins to date Alice.

Key to the story is the fact that it John spent time during World War II in the Pacific, was challenged in his religious views by a rather loud mouth fellow soldier (a strong close-up sequence where the soldier calls out all the objections against what he calls hypocritical religious people who don’t act on the courage of their convictions). John decides that he will go to New Guinea – where the sequences are immediately and introduced by the calls of a kookaburra!
After some years of work, having two children with Alice who has joined him, he contracts a fever and dies. His parents are called and visit him in New Guinea before he dies. John gives his father his unfinished diary.

The latter part of the film is the father’s being very moved by his son’s experience, pondering the diary and its message, reading gospel stories to his grandchildren, deciding that the laity in the church have an important role and moves around the country speaking on financial support and management for the missions.

This is a very earnest film – and it would be interesting to know how it was received on release, by the public, by its target Christian audience.