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.
