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Burt Lancaster won the Academy Award for Best Actor with his performance as a
traveling salesman turned evangelist. He is described as "[h]andsome,
opportunistic, immoral" and figures that that he can make money at a revival
meeting just as well as anywhere else. He joins up with Sister Falconer,
played by Jean Simmons, and soon his "demon-bashing oratories" win him lots
attention. Shirley Jones shows up carrying some secrets from Gantry's past and
he is "forced to confront demons of a more worldly order". 1960, 147 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
This movie about Burt Lancaster trying to save me from damnation all in an
effort to get inside the tight pantaloons of the saintly Sister Sharon Falconer
is surprisingly "adult" for its 1960 release date. I'm not saying that there's
any money shots with Burt or that he drops the F-bomb on the town sinners or
anything. I mean that these people talk about "adult" topics like religion,
sex, and the hypocrisy of a guy who gets closer to God in an effort to get
closer to Jean Simmons. This came as something of a surprise to me, because I
was under the impression that movies were either old and clean cut, complete
with good guys, bad guys and happy ending or new and vulgar starring bald guys
into extreme sports that only grudgingly save the world (and then only because
of the rush). Throw into this film characters that actually have some depth
and aren't easily summed up in a combination of an adjective and noun
(suspended cop, spidery man, talking mouse) and I began to think that maybe I
had been deviously deceived into watching one of those French movies, where
people sit around smoking in their dilapidated flat and have affairs that go no
where, all the while wondering about the meaning of it all. Of course I
needn't have worried, because this one has big Hollywood stars such as
Lancaster, Simmons and even Arthur Kennedy (you'll be relieved to hear that
this guy is not George Kennedy from those Breath-A-Sure commercials - no one
wants to hear about your stanky breath so zip it, loser!) and Lancaster spends
the entire movie giving a tour de force performance filled with the fire and
brimstone that his con man character lets loose on unsuspecting hillbillies and
later even folks from the big city of Zenith. He does this against the
backdrop of the early twenties, when we all kept cool with Coolidge and hung
out at our favorite speakeasy sucking down that bathtub gin like it was Prozac
or something. This was a time when that "old time religion" was running smack
dab up against blasphemers who were promoting this evolution stuff that tried
to say King Kong was my step dad or something. And folks, would you believe
that these devil worshipping clods are still trying to tell our kids their
mamma was a big smelly ape, that it's okay to to do it dog style just for
the fun of it and that other religions and lifestyles are somehow just as good
as being a strong Christian? Where is someone like Elmer Gantry when you
need him (remember he was eventually cleared of those morals charges)?  When the movie started, I noticed that this was based on a book by Sinclair
Lewis. Now, you may have a hard time believing this but Sinclair Lewis is
actually a different person than Upton Sinclair, though Sinclair Lewis once
worked on Upton Sinclair's commie commune. Both of these folks are also
separate from that C.S. Lewis guy. C.S. Lewis was a guy who wrote those Narnia
books about the talking lion (almost as good as that Geena Davis movie with the
talking mouse) and some science fiction books. I had a grade school teacher
who gave me a copy of one of his books and looking back on it all, I would have
to say that this is what is known as "grooming" and that he may have been a
chickenhawk (I was such a pretty lad), but I just want to go record as saying I
have no idea what "playing stinkyfinger" means and further more I was never
alone with him when he took several of us boys fishing that one Saturday.
Anyway Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize for literature, was ripped off of a
Pulitzer by the Columbia University trustees, won it for real later, declined
it, wrote Babbitt, and eventually hired secretaries to play chess with him until he croaked from
the effects of alcoholism. Somewhere in all this, he found time to pen what has
to be regarded as the definitive novel about the nature of religion as Big Con.
Really though, it isn't religion per se that is portrayed that way, so much as
all the people selling it to the masses. The movie sets up the debate nicely
with the interplay between small time grifter Gantry, who has become an
overnight sensation selling his brand of high octane evangelism and the big
city reporter that is traveling with the revivalists, covering their
activities. The movie is able to show how someone like Gantry can throw out
catch phrases from the Bible, use faulty logic, and most importantly holler
louder than anyone else so that while not winning the debate, can drown out the
opposing viewpoint. If you watch these populist types on TV today like Bill
O'Reilly you can see that he's really quite a moron, but you can never tell him
that because he wont shut up. Gantry is better than these modern TV types,
because he's actually intelligent and believes on some level what he says.  Gantry is a small time travelling salesman who spends his time in bars telling
dirty jokes to keep the buyers laughing and in the mood to buy the vacuum
cleaners that they'll never be able to move. It's obvious that his life is a
series of one horse towns, cheap hotels, and nameless women. In fact, he
pretty much tells us so later on in the movie. He's a con man through and
through, lying to his mother on Christmas morning about whether she ever got
some present he never cared enough to actually buy. They manage to really set
up Gantry as about as far away from piety as you can get by having him wake up
from a one night stand and leaving like a thief in the night on Christmas,
Gantry's celebration of the birth of Christ reduced to writing "Merry X-Mas" in
red lipstick on the mirror in the motel room where his cheap skank is still
passed out. Don't get the idea that this is all boring symbolism about what
hypocrites we are all and how we shouldn't both elevate people to heights that
they don't deserve or knock them down to similarly unfair depths because we're
angry that
they turned out as merely human after all. See, the next thing we know, Gantry
is beating up a boxcar load of bums! All together now: BUMFIGHT! One of them
tries to steal his shoes and
Elmer clears house before jumping from the train and showing up in some burg
without any shoes. He ends up in church with a black congregation and when he
eagerly sings their hymns and shovels coal for some food, we can see that his
belief isn't a pure con. Oh, he's not above using religion and his ability to
sell people stuff they don't need or want to get ahead, but the reason he's so
damn good at it, is because he believes in it in his own way. He just believes
in
making God work for him as much as he works for God. This scene in the black
church is important because it establishes this seeming paradox within Gantry -
he's conning the people he preaches to and he's also conning himself. They
believe that he really wants to save them and Gantry believes that he really
doesn't want to and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. For these
"sinners", they aren't really looking to be saved from any demons or anything.
They could get that at any of their local churches any day of the week. They
want to be entertained, they want to be moved, they want to feel the fire in
their bellies about their faith, not the namby pamby crap their elderly and
conservative ministers serve up with the mundane regularity of post-marital
sex. And Gantry? He loves the spotlight, craves applause and is eager to be
important for once in his life. Make no mistake, the sinners and Elmer feed
off of each other and its not about filling their lives with the Holy
Spirit. 
Remember though, that at the heart of all this revivalism is a girl. Ain't
nothing like a pretty gal to either make a guy forget his religion or pick one
up in a hurry. In this case, it's Jean Simmons as the sweet and very devout
Sister Sharon. Sister Sharon is completely wedded to the idea that she is
doing God's work and is delivering them from evil. But it turns out that she
isn't any less a fraud than Elmer is. Sister Sharon is really Katie Jones from
Shantytown (What state is that in?) and she only does these tent revivals to
make enough money to pay for her illegitimate son's sex change operation.
Okay,
I may have told a bit of a fib there. She's saving up her money to build a
tabernacle of her own so that she doesn't have to travel all the time. At
first, she's leery of Elmer and his motives, finding his preaching style and
manners to be loud and vulgar, but you know how the ladies like bad boys,
especially when they're movie stars like Burt Lancaster, and so it should come
as no surprise that she is as interested in him as he is in her. She fights
it for awhile like any faux-good-girl would, but eventually he's pulling her
under the pier in the middle of the night and the next morning she's pouring
sand out of her shoe with that glow emanating from her. I think you know the
kind
of glow I'm talking about. It's the kind that says, "I just got boned on the
beach last night and I don't even care that I still got sand in my crack!"
She'll probably leave that one out of the sermon later that night, but think of
the crowds she could pull in if she didn't! Elmer and his wild, crusading
style are an instant hit with the people and it isn't long before he's leading
a mob of citizens in Zenith (once Elmer and Sharon get called to play in the
big leagues in Zenith, you get a cameo from Sinclair's most famous creation,
Babbitt!) to roust speakeasies, whorehouses, and the Democratic headquarters.
It's during Elmer's raid on a whorehouse that he runs into old flame who has
gone and turned hooker on him. This is where you get to see Mrs. Partridge,
Shirley Jones lounging around in a slip, looking way too hot for Reuben Kincaid
to handle. Elmer quietly asks the cops to let the hookers go later and to get
them out of town. It isn't long before Elmer gets tricked into being photographed in a
compromising position with Lulu Bains (Jones) and the next thing you know,
Sharon is finding out, Elmer is getting extorted and the newspapers are
printing the photos. This single-handedly destroys their preaching business
and leads to Elmer being pelted with food by the few people that show up for
the revival that night. There's a big finish and even though you are worrying
that the movie is going to cop out with a happy ending, it doesn't and finishes
up strong. Aside from Sharon and Elmer, the reporter played by Arthur Kennedy
is one of the more smartly written parts you'll see. He's a cynical reporter
that is skeptical not only of Elmer, but also of Sharon and doesn't hesitate
to tell this to their faces. Yet, he isn't a cartoon character and isn't
cynical because that's the "cool" thing to be. You would probably be closer to
calling him a skeptic than a cynic. He is obviously the voice of the author in
this piece as he continuously questions the nature of faith and those that try
to peddle it all the while raising money in God's name. Even when Elmer uses
cheap emotionalism to stir up the town against him, the reporter refuses to
accept the pictures that Lulu is peddling, because in his mind it isn't news.
In his mind, the only thing it proves is that Elmer Gantry is a human being.
Elmer of course puts himself in such a precarious position precisely because
he's allowed people to believe that he's something beyond or better than human.
I've never understood why everyone wants to be something better than what they
are, as if simply being a decent person is somehow not enough for God. The
movie's
two and a half hours goes by effortlessly, anchored by Lancaster's thunderous
performance and the well drawn characters surrounding him. It probably isn't
quite the stinging indictment of the evangelist business it once was, chiefly
because we've had our own share of real-life Elmer Gantrys, but it certainly
raises some good questions about what it means to believe, what we expect
from others and ourselves, and the fact that at some point religion became just
another commodity to peddle to the masses, like the vacuums, irons, and
toasters Elmer was originally selling. You've just got to do something to
break through all the noise of everything else that's for sale. For awhile at
least, even Elmer bought into his own con, but finally when the con had played
itself out, he smiled, fired off a few last banalities to a once again adoring
crowd and walked off to catch a train out of town. The circus was finally
leaving town and though no one was any closer to God than when it arrived, they
were treated, as were we, to one hell of a dog and pony show.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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