Like everything else in the Lone Star State, our dreams were big from the start. The angriest of Lewiss novels, Elmer Gantry seems to arise from impulses that invert the quixotic. I give this movie a 10 only because there is nothing above that. Elmer Gantry | Encyclopedia.com Jones is too frothy, but when she appears halfway through, she adds bubbles to a long movie that was starting to go flat. Harry Sinclair Lewis, best known as Sinclair Lewis, was born on February 7, 1885, in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. They were intended to feed the American dream, but instead fashioned the nightmareout of books! Elmer Gantry is not, however, a movie about making good choices. So scandalous was Lewiss portrayal of religion that the novel was banned in several cities and denounced from Singer Patti Page in her first film role, with Burt Lancaster, in "Elmer Gantry", Opening title of "Elmer Gantry" (1960), directed by Richard Brooks, Richard Brooks directs Burt Lancaster and Shirley Jones in "Elmer Gantry", Jean Simmons & Lancaster: Italian movie poster for "Elmer Gantry", Shirely Jones (2nd from left) & Lancaster (far right), with Oscars, 1961, Lancaster as Elmer Gantry: "When I was a child, I understood as a child", Rosy Simas of Rosy Simas Danse is Haudenosaunee, Seneca, Heron Clan. Binch stopped gulping his fried pork chops and held out a flabby, white, holy hand.. Mrs. Gantry is Elmers mother. Jean Simmons is lovely and convincing as as Sister Sharon Falconer, the charismatic female evangelist who wins Gantry's heart (and lust)as they team up to jump-start America's dwindling religious beliefs. A charming conman pretends to be a preacher and romances a roadside revivalist. He is influenced by the atheistic Dr. Zechlin who lends him theological works by liberals and skeptics. Interviewing key stakeholders in the company, gathering and organizing information, analyzing data and preparing reports that summarize finding. Named himself in honour of the character in the Burt Lancaster movie Elmer Gantry. Burt Lancaster gives a fierce, bellicose and frightening performance as a salesman turned preacher, brining religion to the people in this screen adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel. I am not going to explain the Scriptures. Bell, a Black youth who had recently transferred out of Central to the High School for Recording Arts, was on Centrals campus to visit one of his former teachers. New collections from David Bowie, Wilco, Joni Mitchell, Joe Strummer and more Now dont you go explaining! Lewis said, flatly enough, that religion in the United States has become stifling; that, like the pioneer economy and the pioneer mentality of which it is a manifestation, it has become a threat instead of a benefit. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. The journey of Judge Joan Lefkow Hartford Courant A typical picaresque narrative chronicles the exploits of a rogue, an immoral but not criminal character who lives by his wits. END During his final year he is restless and bored, but he is given a Sunday appointment at a country church in Schoenheim, eleven miles away, with Frank Shallard as his assistant. If there was a soul to be saved - Gantry would save it. Elmer Gantry is a fast talking, hard drinking traveling salesman who always has a risqu story and a hip flask to entertain cronies and customers alike. Like ordinary mortals, she is often weary. Elmer Gantry In 1944, his son Lieutenant Wells Lewis was killed in action in France during World War II. Jim doubts the literal truth of the Bible and has contempt for the church. That night she seduces him. Light examines what he sees as quixotic elements in the novel, especially in the characters Sharon Falconer and Frank Shallard. They hypnotize themselves, says Jim Lefferts to Elmer, trying to persuade him not to go along with it. Pengilly is an old Methodist pastor who is something of a saintly figure. I have long felt that Burt Lancaster often made movies great because his acting was much bigger-than-life, and he also helped degrade a few movies for this very same reason. At Mizpah Theological Seminary, Elmer and his fellow students all smoke in their dormitory, even though smoking is practically forbidden. Once Gantry accuses the city government of protecting the brothels and drug dealers, he becomes one of the most powerful men in Zenith. I just spend two days at my best friends' home for his father's funerals, and during the obligatory moments of life contemplation, we were wondering what was awaiting us all. The relentless, unrelieved exposure of religious hypocrisy, while amusingly presented in parts, tends to become wearying. One attendant of the revivals even describes himself as only being a good Christian when a revival is in town, and then going back to his old ways once it is gone. Lewis indicates the shaping of minds and values in such a village as Elmers: The church and Sunday School at Elmers village, Paris, Kansas, a settlement of nine hundred evangelical Germans and Vermonters had been the center of all his emotions, aside from hell-raising, hunger, sleepiness, and love. Frank finds some shame in being a preacher and longs to prove that he is nevertheless a real man. Not only had he been swathed in theology, but all his experience had been in books instead of the speech of toiling men. D. J. Dooley remarks that to Lewis Christianity is not only untrue, but inconceivable. Dooley feels that Elmer Gantry is flawed because it is neither a realistic portrayal of the state of religion in America nor a caricature whose manifest unfairness can be forgiven because of the wit and humor which have gone into it. True, unless, taking our cue from Sharon Falconer and the multitude of fraudulent evangelistic minor characters in the book, we begin to see Elmer Gantry as Lewiss triumphant depiction of a land of demons and grotesques of all sizes and shapes, created from the extremes of human impulse and incapable of self-awareness because they are already beyond it, Elmer included. Early in his preaching career he jilts a country girl who loves him and whom he has seduced. Which man seems to have the more vitality? On May 25, 2016, St. Paul School Resource Officer Bill Kraus forcibly arrested then 19-year-old Darion Bell outside of St. Paul Central High School. Your email address will not be published. He says both. Most distressing of all, says Frank, the sermons of the preachers are agonizingly dull. So Frank leaves the church temporarily to enter the army where he learns to be common with common men; he schools himself further with Ethan Frome, Pre Goriot, Tono-Bungay, and Renans Jesus. After dinner, the drunken Elmer picks a fight with a man who is heckling Eddie Fislinger, a fellow Terwillinger College student, as he preaches to an outdoor crowd. Elmer Gantry is a picaresque novel. PG. WebBy John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with During the US Army invasion of Morocco and Algeria in 1943, enroute to the invasion of Italy, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), as the CIA was called then, came up with the donkey turd bomb for destroying the enemy.Since 2014, the CIA has come up with the modern equivalent its called the Ukrainian bomb. The Baptist influences to which Elmer is subjected in his youth, particularly at Terwillinger College and Mizpah Theological Seminary, are handled very roughly. Well, he didn't disappoint here, either, with a fantastic performance as those of you who have seen this already know. (film) Elmer Gantry is a 1960 film about a con man and a female evangelist selling religion to small town America. The film leaves the realities of these mystical happenings up to interpretation, and so gives the congregants active, if small, roles in the narrative. Later judgments have also been mixed. But it's Elmer's past, which catches up with him in Zenith, that may be his, and by association Sister Sharon's, downfall. Form in the novel, he contends, requires that there be an opposition between the individual and society; yet in this book there are no impediments to Elmers barbarous rise from country boob to influential preacher. Elmer Gantry is a loosely episodic chronicle, he continues, which suggests at once that there will be no sustained pressure of plot, no primary conflict about which all the action is organized and in which value will achieve a complex definition. At each of the three climaxes in the book, Lewis retreates into melodrama. She ignores the warning and they become a great success in the big city. The boy sees the preacher as a man who can possibly heal his crippled leg. Given, too, that the film's production was 1960, we can say that "Elmer Gantry" does not reflect the current, 21st century, state of religious fundamentalism in America. She is looking to work in Applied Business Anthropology. She is certainly not the saintly evangelist she presents herself to be, and she maintains a smug sense of superiority over the common folk she seeks to save. A popular singer with a voice like French silk pie, Page is most famous for her hit song Tennessee Waltz. When she first appears onscreen, shes got such presence you might think she was the main heroine. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. Did he approve earthly monarchies or rebel against them? Sign In He preaches at the service that gets Elmer converted. He had learned to assemble Jewish texts, Greek philosophy, and Middle-Western evangelistic anecdotes into a sermon. Franks mentor has been Father Pengilly, a fanciful figure whom we have already discussed. She is a widow who owns a millinery and dressmaking shop. But a grand jury investigation found that McPherson had spent a pleasant month in Mexico with a married man from her church. Buy, Sell, and Trade your Firearms and Gear. Elmer tries but fails to continue as an independent evangelist. Gantrys pugnacious sermons quickly make him popular in Zenith, but the workload soon overwhelms him and alienates him from Cleo. This abridged version of Sinclair Lewiss novel of the same name focuses on Elmer Gantry, a con man expelled from seminary school, and Sister Sharon Falconer, a character loosely based on evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. The acting and directing is superb to the point that it becomes difficult to remember that it is only a movie. The fledgling work even had legs, if short ones. Elmer, after all, is not an idealist; though he ventures forth, he does not do so in the name of chivalry; and, finally, he does not practice the transmuting powers of fancy. Lulu becomes devoted to Elmer but he gets bored with her. When hedonistic but charming con man Elmer Gantry meets the beautiful Sister Sharon Falconer, a roadside revivalist, he feigns piousness to join her act as a passionate preacher. User Ratings Some while later Shallard goes on a lecture tour to speak against fundamentalism. 3945; originally published in New York Herald Tribune Books, March 13, 1927. Burt Lancaster's Oscar Winning performance in the title role was well-worth the accolades. Gantry befriends a famous criminal attorney, T. J. Rigg, who becomes his adviser and confidant. In A Letter on Religion published in 1932, Lewis declared: It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living. He said that he had known several young people who had been reared entirely without thought of churches or of formal theology, and they seemed happy.