Missions and film.

Scott, Jamie S.

We are all familiar with the phenomenon of the "Jesus" film, but various kinds of movies--some adapted from literature or life, some original in conception--have portrayed a variety of Christian missions and missionaries. If "Jesus" films give us different readings of the kerygmatic paradox of divine incarnation, pictures about missions and missionaries explore the entirely human question: Who is or is not the model Christian? Silent movies featured various forms of evangelism, usually Protestant. The trope of evangelism continued in big-screen and later made-for-television "talkies," including musicals. Biographical pictures and documentaries have depicted evangelists in feature films and television productions, and recent years have seen the burgeoning of Christian cinema as a distinct genre. In a related development, various denominations make use of film in proselytizing, and missions and missionaries also figure in educational videos.

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Missions in Silent Movies

Although many silent pictures have been lost, their story lines remain, and stills have often survived. These films depict a variety of missions and missionaries in both domestic and foreign fields. On the home front, evangelicals battle urban poverty and American frontier savagery. The widely recognized film Easy Street (1917; dir. Charles Chaplin), for example, captures the sentiments of a generation of pictures. In this classic, the Hope Mission's beautiful organist inspires a down-and-out Chaplin to join the police to bring order to South London's slums. The renamed New Mission dominates the film's closing sequence, as church bells accompany the on-screen apothegm: "Love backed by force, forgiveness sweet, / Brings hope and peace to Easy Street." Similar sentiments infuse other films set in London's slums. In The Gift Supreme (1920; dir. Ollie L. Sellers) a mission singer wins over a disapproving father by giving blood to save his son, her lover, while a huge inheritance prompts a minister to quit a fashionable parish and open a mission in the Limehouse district in Madonna of the Streets (1924; dir. Edwin Carewe). In Recompense (1925; dir. Harry Beaumont) young lovers returning from World War I medical service in South Africa found an urban mission, and in The Black Bird (1926; dir. Tod Browning) a crippled criminal mastermind becomes a mission director to atone for his misdeeds.

American cities preponderate in silent pictures featuring domestic missions, especially New York. An Edison Company one-reeler, Land Beyond the Sunset (1912; dir. Harold M. Shaw), portrays the Fresh Air Fund, a mission created in 1877 by the Reverend Willard Parsons to provide summer holidays for inner-city children like the film's abused New York newsboy, Little Joe. In Susan Rocks the Boat (1916; dir. Paul Powell) a society girl discovers meaning in life after founding the Joan of Arc Mission, while a disgraced seminarian finds redemption serving in an urban mission in The Waifs (1916; dir. Scott Sidney). New York's East Side mission anchors tales of betrayal and fidelity in To Him That Hath (1918; dir. Oscar Apfel), and bankrolling a mission rekindles a wealthy couple's weary marriage in Playthings of Passion (1919; dir. Wallace Worsley). Luckless lovers from different social strata find a fresh start together at the End of the Trail mission in Virtuous Sinners (1919; dir. Emmett J. Flynn), and a Salvation Army mission worker in New York's Bowery district reconciles with the son of the wealthy businessman who stole her father's invention in Belle of New York (1919; dir. Julius Steger). The Day of Faith (1923; dir. Tod Browning) has a reformed reporter join forces with a mission worker to perpetuate a deceased philanthropist's philosophy, "thy neighbor as thyself."

In 1924 two films featured urban American missions: in The Bowery Bishop (dir. Colin Campbell) a New York evangelist risks his own reputation to help an errant lawyer fulfill his responsibilities to a neighborhood girl and their baby; and in By Divine Right (dir. Roy William Neill) mission workers wed after the male protagonist invokes "divine power" to heal the injured child of a crooked politician competing for the desired woman's affections. The film Fool (1925; dir. Harry Millarde) sees a missionary's sweetheart marrying a millionaire's son, though she and her father-in-law eventually come to realize that true happiness lies in the missionary's life of service, not the millionaire's self-indulgence. In When Danger Calls (1927; dir. Charles Hutchison) an honorable fire inspector rescues the philanthropic sponsor of an inner-city mission from corrupt politicians, and in Good Morning, Judge (1928; dir. William A. Seiter) an idle spendthrift turns crime-fighter to win the heart of a mission worker. As in these melodramas, true love and everlasting joy await self-assured benevolence also in the comedy For Heaven's Sake (1926; dir. Sam Taylor), in which a wealthy playboy defies family and friends to finance a storefront mission and marry the evangelist's aptly named daughter, Hope. Silent films portraying American frontier missions usually end happily as well. The early shorts The Mission Waif, The Mission Father, and The Mission in the Desert, all produced in 1911, depict successful missions in the American West. In Sky Pilot (1921; dir. King Vidor) a muscular Protestant evangelist finds love taming adventurers and civilizing the natives of the Canadian Northwest, while an indigenous rebel and his mission orphan wife accede to the governor's mansion in The Diamond Bandit (1924; dir. Francis Ford), though a Roman Catholic priest loses his life helping the native South Americans in their fight for freedom.

Numerous silent pictures represent missions and missionaries in more exotic-seeming locales as well. In The Mystery of the Poison Pool (1914; dir. James Gordon) sub-Saharan cannibals, a giant python, and a poison pool fail to quell the love between a young missionary and a diamond prospector wrongly accused of murder. In Always in the Way (1915; dir. J. Searle Dawley) an abandoned runaway reunites with her natural father in the United States after Zulus kill her missionary stepparents, and in White Hands (1922; dir. Lambert Hillyer) a reformed sea salt helps a Saharan missionary's daughter, a drug addict, and a mysterious child called Peroxide return to civilization. Love's Wilderness (1924; dir. Robert Z. Leonard) tracks the trials of true love between a medical missionary and an aristocratic ingenue from Louisiana via Africa and Canada to the French Guyanese penal colony of Devil's Island. A Daughter of the Congo (1930; dir. Oscar Micheaux), which was criticized for racial typecasting, posits mission education as the salvation of a beautiful mulatto girl rescued from Arab slave traders by African-Americans of the Tenth United States Cavalry, who are keeping the peace in Liberia.

Other exotic settings include China, India, and Turkey. A film that is tragic in outlook, Red Lantern (1919; dir. Albert Capellani), tells of a mission-educated Eurasian girl who finds her affections spurned by the son of an American evangelist, styles herself as the Chinese Goddess of the Red Lantern, then commits suicide when her prophecies supporting the Boxer Rebellion fail. In Eve's Leaves (1926; dir. Paul Sloane) adventurous lovers oblige a missionary to marry them as he reads psalms to the Chinese bandits they are fleeing, while in Streets of Shanghai (1927; dir. Louis J. Gasnier) a mission serves as a battleground between American marines and Chinese warlords. An Indian prince becomes an Anglican missionary in The Rip-Tide (1923; dir. Jack Pratt), then abandons Christianity to marry an Indian princess, while in The Arab (1924; dir. Rex Ingram) a Bedouin Muslim falls in love with an American missionary and prevents the massacre of a Christian community in Turkey.

Several silent pictures were also staged in the South Pacific. A Woman There Was (1919; dir. J. Gordon Edwards) dramatized a doomed romance between a young English missionary and a South Pacific princess, and Godless Men (1921; dir. Reginald Barker) has father-and-son pirates fighting to the death over the fate of a missionary's ward after the father discovers that the ward is his long-lost daughter. In Infidel (1922; dir. James Young) an actress rejects her Christian upbringing, then rediscovers her faith when forced to choose sides between shady fortune-hunters and hospitable missionaries, while in The Ragged Edge (1923; dir. E Harmon Weight) a missionary's daughter rehabilitates and marries a wrongly accused alcoholic fugitive. An equally sobering scenario informs Where the Pavement Ends (1923; dir. Rex Ingram), in which a missionary and his daughter return home after his battle with a bar owner for the souls of native islanders ends in the publican's death, and the daughter breaks the heart of a native chieftain, who then commits suicide. In The Marriage Cheat (1924; dir. John Griffith Wray) a missionary provides an island home for a traveler and her newborn when her womanizing husband drowns in a storm, while in Breed of the Sea (1926; dir. Ralph Ince) a disgraced divinity student turned pirate strikes a deal with an unscrupulous trader to guarantee a safe environment for the twin brother of the former in order to found a mission on an island in the Java Sea.

Missions in "Talkies"

In the late 1920s, films called talkies developed the more nuanced range of attitudes toward missions and missionaries that was foreshadowed in silent pictures like the light-hearted Just Like a Woman (1923; dir. Scott R. Beal and Hugh McClung), in which the heroine leads a double life as aspiring evangelist by day and frolicsome flapper by night, and the more unforgiving Sadie Thompson (1928; dir. William Cameron Menzies and Raoul Walsh), soon remade as the talkie Rain (1932; dir. Lewis Milestone), in which a hypocritical South Pacific missionary preaches morality to a prostitute servicing American servicemen then rapes her himself. Later she marries a marine, and the missionary commits suicide. Other less than sympathetic portrayals follow. On the domestic front, small-town America serves as the backdrop for confidence tricksters posing as evangelists in the comedy Tillie and Gus (1933; dir. Francis Martin), while Elmer Gantry (1960; dir. Richard Brooks) remains a classic depiction of the evangelical marketing of Christianity in the American Bible Belt. Missions in foreign fields also receive severe treatment. In East of Borneo (1931; dir. George Melford) a medical missionary serves as drunken court physician to an island despot, while in Return to Paradise (1953; dir. Mark Robson) a puritanical evangelist browbeats Pacific islanders, a theme reiterated in Hawaii (1966; din George Roy Hill). Paralleling the aspirations of a zealous missionary and an obsessed inventor, The Mosquito Coast (1986; dir. Peter Weir) confirms the perilous futility of blind fanaticism, a tragic theme humorously rehearsed in Eversmile, New Jersey (1989; dir. Carlos Sorin), which tracks an itinerant dentist's evangelical resolve to bring the Eversmile Foundation of New Jersey's "dental consciousness" to the darkened souls of Argentina's Patagonia. At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991; dir. Hector Babenco) dramatizes the destructive tensions between fundamentalist Protestant and Roman Catholic missions competing for the souls of the indigenous Niaruna people in the jungles of contemporary Brazil.

Numerous talkies maintained the good repute of missions and missionaries, however, both in home fields and abroad. Domestic evangelism remained a popular film vehicle in the 1930s. Madonna of the Streets (1930; din John S. Robertson) features love and intrigue at a mission on San Francisco's Barbary Coast, while The Miracle Woman (1931; dir. Frank Capra), inspired by the story of Aimee Semple McPherson, sees a blind man's trust transform a disillusioned minister's daughter from a sham revivalist into a genuine evangelist. In Soul of the Slums (1931; dir. Frank Strayer) a framed convict falls in love with an inner-city mission worker, forgoes revenge upon his accusers, and dedicates his life to her cause. Impersonating an evangelist in good faith brings unforeseen blessings in Klondike Annie (1936; dir. Raoul Walsh), but in Arctic Manhunt (1949; dir. Ewing Scott) fraudulently posing as a missionary to indigenous Alaskans fails to save a former convict from perishing in melting spring ice. Other American films include Apache Rifles (1964; dir. William Witney), in which love for a half-Native American missionary cures a cavalry officer's prejudice toward Apaches; and the apocalyptic Bells of Innocence (2003; dir. Ali Bijan), which drops evangelists who are flying Bibles to Mexico into the middle of the Texas desert, where they battle the forces of evil. A few films dramatize English home missions as well. Benevolent missionaries save a young thief in The Supreme Secret (1958; dir. Norman Walker), a preachy picture set in London's docklands and rereleased as God Speaks Today (1965); and the comic The Missionary (1982; dir. Richard Loncraine) finds a veteran of the African fields involved in sexual shenanigans with a wealthy benefactress when assigned to a slum mission for prostitutes in Edwardian London.

Other favorable images appear in pictures portraying overseas missions and missionaries. Once again, Africa, China, and the South Pacific prove popular settings. In Trader Horn (1931; dir. W. S. Van Dyke) the passing of a dedicated missionary inspires adventurers to good deeds in Africa, and the death of a British missionary in German East Africa prompts the romanticized World War I action of The African Queen (1951; din John Huston). In the ten-minute one-reeler Kid in Africa (1932; dir. Jack Hays) children play stereotyped colonial roles, including that of a missionary. Several films feature medical missionaries: A Distant Trumpet (1952; dir. Terence Fisher) has a London Harley Street physician swap duties with his brother, a medical missionary in Africa; Men Against the Sun (1953; dir. Brendan J. Stafford) features romance between a medical missionary and a surveyor building the first railway from Mombassa, Kenya, to the Ugandan interior; and White Witch Doctor (1953; dir. Henry Hathaway) contrasts kindly Christian medics with colonial speculators trying to hoodwink hostile Congolese tribesmen into revealing the whereabouts of remote gold deposits. Missionaries also question Western mineral exploitation in Jungle Drums of Africa (1953; dir. Fred C. Brannon), a twelve-part serial feature reedited for television as U-238 and the Witch Doctor (1966; dir. Fred C. Brannon), in which a missionary's daughter teams up with uranium explorers against spies, lions, and African tribes. Similar themes occur in Beyond Mombasa (1956; dir. George Marshall) and Thunder over Sangoland (1955; dir. Sam Newfield), which combines three episodes of the television series Ramar of the Jungle (1952). Amissionary's daughter tries to make an honest man of an American confidence trickster in Mister Moses (1965; dir. Ronald Neame), while African-American evangelists return to their West African tribal roots in The Color Purple (1985; dir. Steven Spielberg).

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Talkies continue to reflect the status of China as a mission field, especially for Americans during the years of China's War of Resistance against Japan (1937-45) and its civil wars (1927-37 and 1946-50). In The Right to Love (1930; dir. Richard Wallace) a possessive father sends his daughter to China as a missionary, where she finds love after all, while a missionary's naive son returns to California from China seeking a wife and instead discovers a career as a political reformer. West of Shanghai (1937; dir. John Farrow) ends with a Chinese warlord sacrificing his life to enable an evangelist to marry the American oilman of her dreams, and Shining Victory (1941; dir. Irving Rapper) ends with a refugee Czech psychologist leaving for China as a medical missionary after losing his wife and research notes in a fire in Scotland. Medical missionaries make a World War II love triangle in China Sky (1945; dir. Ray Enright), while in The Amazing Mrs. Holliday (1943; dir. Bruce Manning) an evangelist smuggles Chinese war orphans into the United States.

A few films feature Roman Catholic missionaries. In The Keys of the Kingdom (1944; dir. John M. Stahl) a priest hones his pastoral skills before returning to Scotland to minister to troubled youth, and in The Left Hand of God (1955; dir. Edward Dmytryk) American sisters provide shelter to a downed American mercenary pilot posing as a priest who had been murdered, to avoid capture by Communists. In Satan Never Sleeps (1962; din Leo McCarey) priests flee Red soldiers with an unlikely trio: a village girl, her infant son, and the Communist commander who raped the girl, fathered the boy, but now as a family man rejects Communism. The Sand Pebbles (1966; dir. Robert Wise) sees the gunboat USS San Pablo rescue occupants of the China Light Mission caught between warring factions up the Yangtze River, and in Seven Women (1966; dir. John Ford) American evangelists shelter refugees from the ravages of cholera and a Mongol warlord. A later variation on these themes, Shanghai Surprise (1986; dir. Jim Goddard), revolves around the efforts of a missionary nurse to obtain black-market opium for wounded Chinese soldiers during the Japanese occupation in 1937.

Different dramas characterize mission talkies set in the South Pacific islands, many taking advantage of their remoteness. In The Vessel of Wrath (1938; dir. Bartlett Cormack and Erich Pommer) a carousing remittance man attempts to stem a cholera outbreak to earn the love of a pious evangelist in the Alas Islands, a Dutch outpost in the South Pacific, while a remake called The Beachcomber (1954; dir. Muriel Box) transfers the action to the Welcome Islands, a fictitious British colony in the Indian Ocean, where the couple is sentenced to death by a tribal leader for failing to cure his daughter. In On the Isle of Samoa (1950; dir. William A. Berke) a fugitive gambler crash-lands on an uncharted Samoan island where a missionary persuades him to return to civilization to face the music. Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957; dir. John Huston) stages a love affair between a shipwrecked American marine and a Roman Catholic nun on a Pacific island during World War II; a low-budget version of this film appeared later as The Nun and the Sergeant (1962; dir. Franklin Adreon). The Last Flight of Noah's Ark (1980; din Charles Jarrott) tracks the efforts of a missionary to colonize a remote island with various animals, a place occupied by two Japanese soldiers still fighting World War II, whfleNateandHayes (1983; dir. Ferdinand Fairfax) pits a young missionary couple against swashbuckling pirates. Angel in Green (1987; dir. Marvin J. Chomsky) sees an American Army Special Forces Unit training a Roman Catholic sister and her island flock to defend themselves against terrorists whose raids have killed a missionary priest and decimated the island population.

South Asia provides settings for a few good missionaries, while still others are depicted in locations as various as Haiti, Indonesia, and South America. If steamy relations among India's colonial elites include a mission runaway in The Rains Came (1939; dir. Clarence Brown), Black Narcissus (1947; dir. Michael Powell) dramatizes the efforts of nuns of the Saint Faith Order to transform a Himalayan potentate's former pleasure palace into an Anglican convent, school, and hospital. In the aftermath of India's independence an evangelist's blind daughter distracts a mercenary from running guns to Ghandahari rebels in Thunder in the East (1953; dir. Charles Vidor). In White Zombie (1932; dir. Victor Halperin), by contrast, a missionary helps to save a beautiful young woman from living death among Haitian zombies. Using Spain's sale of areas of Brazil to Portugal in 1750 as an allegory for Latin American tensions in the 1980s, The Mission (1986; dir. Roland Joffe) examines relations between indigenous and non-indigenous interests in the contrasting attitudes of two Jesuit priests, one an idealist who preaches peaceful native resistance, the other a reformed slaver and fratricide who abandons his vows and leads armed opposition to European aggression. Based on World War II events, Paradise Road (1997; dir. Bruce Beresford) recaptures the will to survive of European women who were caught fleeing Singapore by the Japanese and were then interned in Sumatra, among them a British missionary who helps to form an a cappella ensemble to keep spirits high.

Several talkies offer more ambiguous or even negative depictions of missions and missionaries, both at home and abroad. In Laughing Sinners (1931; dir. Harry Beaumont) a Salvation Army captain rescues a suicidal nightclub singer who turns her talents to urban evangelizing. She relapses, but the captain leaves the ministry rather than lose her. In So Evil My Love (1948; dir. Lewis Allen) a missionary's widow falls under a villain's spell in a shipboard romance and commits murder, repenting only when her lover double-crosses her. In Black Robe (1991; dir. Bruce Beresford) the earnest efforts of a Jesuit priest to convert Huron natives in seventeenth-century Quebec lead to his spiritual humbling and their falling easy victims to longtime enemies, the Iroquois, while in The Apostle (1997; dir. Robert Duvall) a Pentecostal preacher builds a new congregation among Louisiana's rural poor before being jailed for having previously killed his wife's lover, a curate at their affluent Texas church. Also set in Louisiana, The Reaping (2007; dir. Stephen Hopkins) sees a lapsed missionary turn skeptical professor of theology, only later to recover a sense of the supernatural when apocalyptic horrors threaten the rural community of Haven.

Other such films take place overseas. The Congo serves as the setting for The Sins of Rachel Cade (1961; dir. Gordon Douglas), in which a downed World War II flyer impregnates a medical missionary, who then seeks solace with a spurned colleague when the flyer leaves. In The Nun's Story (1969; din Fred Zinnemann), which also takes place in the Congo, a sister forsakes the veil after Nazis kill her father and her superiors wastefully redirect her medical skills from Congolese natives to European colonials. Elsewhere, in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933; dir. Frank Capra) a Chinese general prefers suicide to dishonoring an American missionary's fiancee who captures his heart, and in Ethan (1964; dir. Michael DuPont) an alcoholic missionary priest dies defending the Filipino woman he loves. An evangelist's nymphomaniac daughter adds spice to the lives of Europeans seeking Oriental enlightenment in Bali (1970; dir. Ugo Liberatore), while in Oscar and Lucinda (1997; dir. Gillian Armstrong) an Anglican priest falls in love with a nineteenth-century Australian businesswoman, then wagers that he can safely transport her glass church into the interior. In Dancing at Lughnasa (1998; dir. Pat O'Connor) a missionary priest, gone native after twenty-five years in a Ugandan leper colony, returns to Ireland in 1936 to remind rural Roman Catholics of their pagan Irish roots.

A few musicals and made-for-television movies also feature missionaries. The musicals include remakes of the silent picture The Belle of New York (1952; dir. Charles Walters) and Miss Sadie Thompson (1953; dir. Curtis Bernhardt), a bowdlerized version of Rain. In Down Among the Sheltering Palms (1953; dir. Edmund Goulding) a missionary and an American army captain try in vain to prevent the troops from fraternizing with South Pacific island girls, while in Guys and Dolls (1955; dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz) an incorrigible New York gambler takes an innocent Salvation Army worker to Havana on a bet, returns in love, then risks losing the girl by using the mission for a high-stakes crap game.

Among made-for-television films, a missionary finds his vocation among the natives of northwest Canada in I Heard the Owl Call My Name (1973; dir. Daryl Duke), while in Valley of Mystery (1967; dir. Joseph Lejtes) SouthAmerican natives prevent a manic missionary from sacrificing the survivors of an airplane crash; another mad missionary finds shelter in the jungles of South America in The Lost World (2001; dir. Stuart Orme). An evangelist tries to reform a womanizing drunk in Wilson's Reward (1980; dir. Patrick O'Neal), which is set in the Caribbean, and the miniseries Shogun (1980; dir: Jerry London) implicates Roman Catholic missionary priests in conflicts between Europeans and samurai for control of sixteenth-century Japan. Forbidden Territory: Stanley's Search for Livingstone (1997; dir. Simon Langton) updates the feature film Stanley and Livingstone (1939; dir. Henry King), which dramatizes American reporter Henry Morton Stanley' s 1871 expedition to find the Scottish missionary David Livingstone in central Africa, events that are also captured in the documentaries David Livingstone (1936; dir. James A. Fitzpatrick) and Great Adventurers: David Livingstone, Journey to the Heart of Africa (1999; dir. Robert Corsini).

Films and Videos in Christian Missionizing

It is important to note that Christian organizations also make use of film, often for overt missionary purposes. Many bio-pics (biographical pictures) and documentaries bring evangelists to the screen. The rare In the Land of the Setting Sun; or, Martyrs of Yesterday (1919; dir. Raymond Wells) tells of the origins of the Cayuse War (1848-55) in the murder of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, American Missionary Board evangelists who in 1836 brought agriculture, literacy, and the "White Man's Book of Heaven" to Waiilatpu, on the Walla Walla River in what is today Washington State. Other early examples are the Belgian silent picture Missionaires italiens aux Indes (Italian Missionaries in the Indies) (1932; dir. Raphael Algoet) and The Call (1938; dir. Leon Poirier), a celebration of Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), who gave up a family fortune to serve the Touareg people of the Sahara as the Trappist "Brother Charles of the desert." Abuna Messias (1939; dir. Geoffredo Alessandrini) serves as propaganda for Italy's invasion of Ethiopia by glorifying the efforts of the Capuchin Franciscan Guglielmo Massaia (1809-89) to convert Galla Coptic Christians to the Roman Catholic Church, while films like L'Elite noire de demain (The Black Elite of Tomorrow) (1950; dir. Gerard De Boe) and others document European missionary activities in various other foreign fields. The 1950s also saw the bio-pics Battle Hymn (1956; dir. Douglas Sirk), about Dean E. Hess (b. 1917), the American "flying parson," who bombed German orphans in World War II and then saved Korean ones in the Korean War; The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958; dir. Mark Robson), about Gladys Aylward (1902-70), the English missionary who saved Chinese children from the invading Japanese in 1938; and Molokai, la isla maldita (1959; dir. Luis Lucia), about Damien de Veuster (1840-89), the Belgian Sacred Heart priest who worked with lepers on Molokai, Hawaii's so-called island of the damned, a life that was revisited in Molokai: The Story of Father Damien (1999; dir. Paul Cox).

Later bio-pics and documentaries include Mission to Glory: A True Story and Kino, the Padre on Horseback (both 1977; both dir. Ken Kennedy), about the seventeenth-century Southwest missionary Father Francisco "Kino" Kin, who mediated between the Spaniards and the Apache; Hudson Taylor (1981; dir. Ken Anderson), about James Hudson Taylor's Shanghai ministry; Choices of the Heart (1983; dir. Joseph Sargent), about Jean Donovan, the Irish lay missionary murdered in E1 Salvador in 1980; The Law of Love (1989; dir. Penelope Lee), about Jackie Pullinger (b. 1943), the English lay missionary whose work with heroin junkies in Hong Kong's Walled City led to the founding of the St. Stephen's Society for drug addiction; and Mama Luka Comes Home (1989; dir. Crawford Telfer), about Helen Roseveare (b. 1925), the English evangelist who was beaten and raped during the Congo's Simba Rebellion (1964) but returned in 1966 to renew her medical mission. Chariots of Fire (1981; dir. Hugh Hudson) is notable for contrasting the stories of Eric Liddell, a Scottish athlete and later missionary whose devotion to God drives him to compete in the 1924 Paris Olympics, and Harold Abrahams, a wealthy Jew who runs to claim equality for his people.

Other films in these genres include Light in the Jungle (1990; dir. Gray Hofmeyr), about the medical missionary Albert Schweitzer; Zamperini: Still Carrying the Torch (1992; dir. Michael O. Sajbel), about Louis S. Zamperini (b. 1917), a hero of the 1936 Berlin Olympics and World War II who builds a ministry among the young, the elderly, and athletes after being converted at Billy Graham's first crusade in San Francisco in 1949; Obstacle to Comfort: The Life of George Mueller (1805-98) (1997; dir. Ken Connolly), about the "father" of over 10,000 English orphans, whose Scriptural Knowledge Institution for Home and Abroad trained and funded independent Baptist missionaries; and St. Patrick: The Irish Legend (2000; dir. Robert Hughes), a made-for-television reconstruction of the life of Eire's patron saint. The Other Side of Heaven (2002; dir. Mitch Davis) lionizes the young John H. Groberg (b. 1934), an American Mormon missionary to Tongan islanders in the South Pacific in the 1950s. Particularly poignant, Beyond the Gates of Splendor (2002; dir. Jim Hanon) documents the murder of five missionaries by Waodani natives in Ecuador's Amazon basin in 1956. The feature film End of the Spear (2005; dir. Jim Hanon) re-creates this story, while both pictures stress the eventual conversion of the Waodani and reconciliation between the families of the victims and perpetrators. Made for television, Mother Teresa (2003; dir. Fabrizio Costa) celebrates the Albanian Roman Catholic nun who founded Missionaries of Charity and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her humanitarian work, while The Black-Bearded Barbarian of Taiwan (2006; dir. Susan Papp) pays tribute to George Leslie Mackay, the Canadian missionary who became a national hero in Taiwan for his prophetic opposition to the 1885 head tax.

Christian organizations are often directly involved in producing and distributing films and videos celebrating missionary accomplishments. Early on the scene, for example, Wycliffe Bible Translators funded The Good Seed (1986), which portrays the missionizing of the Tzeltals in southern Mexico and of the Payas in the mountains of Colombia. More recently, New Tribes Mission released The Taliabo Story: The Search for the River of Eternal Life (1997), which details the conversion of the inhabitants of a remote Indonesian island. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship markets videos of the plenary addresses at Urbana, its triennial student mission convention. Some early titles of these videos include Declaring Christ as Lord in the City (1983), Helen Roseveare: Motivation for Missions (1987), and five others, all produced in 1990: Hope for Creative Access Countries, Hope for Racial Reconciliation in Mission, Hope for the Cities, Strongest in the Broken Places, and Students in World Mission (1990).

In a related development, Christian cinema has blossomed as a distinct industry. Styled as the film ministry of Evangelical Baptist Missions, for instance, Harvest Productions focuses on the role of the Bible in conversion, tailoring shorts to local markets in several languages, with captions for the deaf and hearing-impaired. Typical of Harvest's extensive list, the films Yes and Goodbye and A Dream Begun dramatize the lives of Sonny, Laurie, and their son Brad, an American missionary family intent on evangelizing in contemporary France. Even more ambitious, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association's World Wide Pictures (WWP) produces and distributes feature films as missionary vehicles. Its Road to Redemption (2001; dir. Richard Vernon) adopts the conventions of the road movie for Christian outreach, while other releases explicitly portray evangelists, such as Last Flight Out (2003; dir. Jerry Jameson), which pits a medical missionary against Colombian drug-runners. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) has backed numerous films, from shorts like the early Worthy to Stand (1969; dir. Judge Whitaker) and the more recent Dear John (2004; dir. John Lyde) to features like Saints and Soldiers (2003; dir. Ryan Little), which dramatizes the exploits of a former Mormon missionary during World War II's Battle of the Bulge (1945), and Suits on the Loose (2005; dir. Rodney Henson), in which posing as Mormon missionaries leads two juvenile delinquents to confront their dishonorable past. Also part of the Christian film industry, such events as the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival and the itinerant Christian Film Festivals of America provide venues for proselytizing pictures. Mormons also fund the annual LDS Film Festival.

Christian educational institutions also promote visual missionary material. For example, a Web site of Southern Nazarene University (Oklahoma City, Okla.) lists the missiological film resources available in the university's media center, categorizing materials under the headings "Cultural Anthropology," "Compassion Issues," "General Interest," "History of Missions," "Linguistics," "Religions of the World," "Strategy of Missions," and "Theology and Biblical Basis of Missions" (http://home. snu.edu/~hculbert/videos.htm). Secular videos used in public education also sometimes feature missions and missionaries. Such videos vary in focus, from the global reach of Christianity: The First Two Thousand Years (2001) to the regional concerns of The Pacific Century (1992), the ninth episode of which counts missionaries among American "sentimental imperialists" in Asia, to the denominational preoccupations of Get the Fire (2002), a U.S. Public Broadcasting Service Frontline program on Mormon missionary work.

The movies described here certainly do not exhaust the catalog of films and videos relating in some way to missions. Take, for example, what we users of English call "foreign-language films." I have mentioned several hagiographic portrayals of celebrated Christian missionaries, but numerous fictional depictions also exist. In the Italian-Spanish Encrucijada para una monja (A Nun at the Crossroads) (1967; dir. Lucio Fulci), for example, natives rape a missionary nun, who must then give up her baby to remain in the order or abandon her calling to become a single mother. The Swedish Djungelaeventyret Campa-Campa (Jungle Adventure Campa Campa) (1976; dir. Torgny Anderberg) dramatizes tensions between Campa natives and a missionary priest who abducts two children from a home in the Peruvian Amazon to raise them as Christians. Bawa Duka (1997; dir. Dharmasiri Bandaranayake) explores the disruptive social and cultural effects of British colonial missionizing in early twentieth-century southern Sri Lanka, while the Swiss-German-French Flammen im Paradies (Fire in Paradise) (1997; dir. Markus Imhoof) ends in tragedy after a wealthy bride and a woman sailing to marry a missionary in late colonial India swap identities aboard a luxury liner. Such pictures suggest possibilities for comparative studies in mission history, theology, and film. Other religious traditions also include what we might meaningfully call a missionary impulse, which would merit further research. Movies projecting different takes on such varied religious phenomena as Jews for Jesus and Jews for Judaism, Muslim da'wah and Islamic jihad, Hindu shuddhi groups, the Hare Krishna movement, Zen Buddhism in the West, and Soka Gakkai could open doors for comparative studies in religion, mission, and film.

Jamie S. Scott, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Research Institute for the Advanced Study of Humanity, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia, teaches courses in religion and culture. He is the editor of Religions of Canadians (Oxford, forthcoming).