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Movie Review: Elmer Gantry (1960) [1]
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Date: 2025-03-08
SPOILER ALERT!
The opening shot of Elmer Gantry (1960) is the first page of the novel by Sinclair Lewis on which it is based, beginning with the line, “Elmer Gantry was drunk,” as indeed he is in the scene that follows. This suggests a more faithful adaptation than it really is.
But that’s all right because a faithful adaptation of that novel would have been prohibitively long, one in which a superficially religious scoundrel encounters and participates in the many manifestations of Christianity, replete with fraud and folly.
Instead, the movie uses as a framework the part of the novel involving Sharon Falconer, an evangelist played by Jean Simmons, and her relationship with the title character, played by Burt Lancaster. But by itself, that would not have made much of a movie. So, characters and incidents in the novel from before and after this section are synthesized and modified so they can be worked into the movie in order to spice things up.
The moral center of the movie is an atheist, Jim Lefferts, played by Arthur Kennedy. At one point during one of Sharon Falconer’s tent revival meetings, Lefferts and some other reporters are sitting at a table. When she calls for a prayer, everyone starts getting on his knees, including the other reporters, but not Lefferts. Sharon looks directly at him, asking, “Are you too proud to kneel, Mr. Lefferts? You may not believe in God, but God believes in you.”
After looking around the room at all the people kneeling, he smirks and gets on his knees, as if to say, “It means nothing to me, but I guess it means something to you.”
An atheist will typically bow his head when someone says, “Let us pray.” When in court, being sworn in under oath and hearing the words, “So help you God,” most atheists will simply say, “I do.” I once even allowed myself to receive communion just to be polite.
But kneeling is a bit much. So, it is no wonder that Lefferts didn’t feel like going that far. And what did it accomplish? Did Sharon think this was some kind of victory for God, when it was nothing but a compliant gesture on Lefferts’ part to keep from embarrassing her?
Presumably, this was a way of establishing Lefferts’ indifference to religion, even to the point of participating in a ritual he cares nothing about.
In the novel, Lefferts is not a reporter. Instead, he is a student at Terwillinger College, founded by Baptists and strictly fundamentalist. He is the roommate and best friend of Gantry. His atheism expresses itself by such things as doubting that Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt or that Methuselah lived 969 years. That seems a bit shallow and superficial, but at a college like Terwillinger in 1902, I suppose that is all one can expect.
Lefferts’ favorite thinker is Robert G. Ingersoll, known as the Great Agnostic. After Gantry allows himself to be saved one night in a moment of excitement, pressure is put upon him to make a speech. He struggles to come up with something, but to no avail. Finally, Lefferts says, “Why don't you pinch your first sermon from the heathen? You won't be the first up-and-coming young messiah to do it!”
In one of Lefferts’ books on Ingersoll, Gantry finds a speech that praises love as “the Morning and Evening Star,” going on at length at how it is the one thing that makes life worth living. Gantry figures that the people he will be preaching to have only heard about Ingersoll, whom they despise as an atheist, so they won’t recognize the quote. It becomes his favorite sermon, continuing to use it throughout the rest of the novel and in the movie, finding Ingersoll’s words about love more inspiring than anything he ever read in or about the Bible.
Later in the novel, we learn that he is mean to his wife, bothered by his children, and kicks his dog when no one is looking.
Lefferts likes to scandalize the faculty by disingenuously saying he doesn’t understand certain passages in the Bible, such as why Joshua needed to have God make the sun stand still during a battle when Joshua and his men could knock down big walls just by blowing trumpets. One of the professors, a Dr. Quarles, chastises him for questioning the ways of God. The final straw is when Lefferts asks where Cain got his wife. That evening, Dr. Quarles finds comfort from his wife, who knows about “that awful senior.”
I can’t help but think that Lewis emphasized the question of Cain’s wife because it came up in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which a John T. Scopes was charged with the crime of teaching evolution in a high school in Dayton, Tennessee. Inherit the Wind (1960) depicted that trial. In that movie, Spencer Tracy plays Henry Drummond, who in turn represents Clarence Darrow; Frederick March plays Matthew Harrison Brady, who in turn represents William Jennings Bryan. At one point in the novel, Gantry fancies himself the “William Jennings Bryan of the Methodist Church,” and the trial becomes the subject on an incident in the novel.
Darrow gets the idea of turning the Bible against Bryan. At one point, he refers to the story in Genesis 4 where Cain kills Abel, after which it mentions that Cain “knew his wife,” and they had a son. As an aside, we laugh at this euphemism “know” for sex, but it’s really no sillier than our use of the word “see” for that purpose, as in, “I’ve started seeing someone.”
Anyway, Darrow asks Bryan where Cain’s wife came from. Bryan wisecracks that he’ll let the agnostics worry about her. The transcript from the actual trial is a little different, but the import is the same: Bryan shrugs off the question of Cain’s wife, saying he isn’t concerned about her.
The movie is intended for a mainstream audience, one that accepts evolution as a fact and thinks it ludicrous that there are still fundamentalists, about twenty percent of the American population at last reckoning, who believe in the literal truth of the Bible as the inspired word of God. And so it is that Bryan is made to look like a fool. In fact, like Dr. Quarles, he goes home to his wife for comfort, sniveling about how he is being mistreated by Darrow.
Now, Bryan was a politician, so it is understandable that, fundamentalist though he may have been, he was not prepared to answer some of the questions Darrow asked him about the Bible. But Dr. Quarles of Lewis’s novel is a biblical scholar, so it is strange that he seems unaware that the Bible implicitly answers that question in Genesis 5:4-5, where it says that Adam lived 930 years, during which time he had sons and daughters. In other words, Cain married one of his sisters.
So, why did Lewis make Dr. Quarles ignorant on this point? Maybe Lewis himself never read Genesis 5. For that matter, Clarence Darrow probably didn’t read it either, even though it is the chapter right after Genesis 4, which refers to Cain’s wife.
Two other possibilities come to mind, other than a failure to turn the page and find the answer. In marrying one of his sisters, Cain committed incest, and fundamentalists might prefer to dismiss the question as to where Cain got his wife than admit that. But if the entire human race descended from one man and one woman, there would have to be a lot of incest along the way, in the first few generations at least. Eventually, in Leviticus 20:17, it is stated that having sex with one’s sister is forbidden, but by that time, the population of the Earth was such that incest was no longer a necessity, just a temptation.
A second possibility is that it is hard to fully accept, even if only for the sake of the story, the idea that people lived so long in those days. Although we read that Adam lived 930 years, Methuselah, 969 years, Noah, 950 years, and so on, we tend to dismiss this kind of longevity as soon as we read about it. In spite of ourselves, we think of these characters in Genesis as having a life expectancy similar to our own, and probably much less. And so it is that we imagine that Cain killed Abel when he was a teenager and then got married a couple of years after that. In fact, Cain may have killed Abel when he was, say, 103 and then got around to getting married when he was 246, plenty of time for one of Adam’s daughters to become available.
But I digress. Let us turn to Sharon Falconer. In the movie, she is a sincere Christian, with love in her heart. In the novel, her religious beliefs go way beyond ordinary Christianity. She says she cannot sin because she is sanctified. So, even if she does what for others would be a sin, such as fornicating, in her case she remains pure. She says she is the reincarnation of Joan of Arc, of Catherine of Siena. She says she is better than any men evangelists because they are only God’s message, whereas she is “God’s right hand.” She thinks she is the essence of the Virgin Mary and every goddess of every pagan religion, ultimately believing that she will be the next Messiah.
In both the novel and the movie, it all comes to an end one night when fire breaks out in the tabernacle that she had finally been able to build. So strong is her belief in God that she fails to bolt for the exit like everyone else, thinking that God will protect her, refusing even Gantry’s efforts to save her. As a result, she dies.
In the movie, her assistant tries to talk Gantry into continuing with her work, to which he responds, “‘When I was a child, I spake as a child. I understood as a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things.’ St. Paul, First Corinthians, 13:11.” There is a deliberate ambiguity in the “childish things” to which Gantry refers, aside from what Paul had in mind at the time. Is he referring to revival meetings only or to religion in all forms? He is holding what is left of Sharon’s Bible, but possibly only as a keepsake. In either event, the movie ends suggesting that Gantry has learned something from the experience, that he will become a better person now. There is no such line in the novel, where Gantry continues with his selfish, hypocritical ways while rising ever higher in the Christian hierarchy.
It is interesting that of all the ways Sharon Falconer could have died, Lewis chose to kill her off in a fire, which naturally suggests Hell. I suppose it was intended as a bit of irony. In the novel, one of Gantry’s fellow students, who becomes a minister, starts wondering about the point of religion. Perhaps, he suspects, it is just “fire insurance.”
Falconer’s character is said to be based on that of Aimee Semple McPherson, a prominent evangelist of the 1920s, although only loosely. For one thing, McPherson never died in a fire. However, in The Miracle Woman (1931), Barbara Stanwyck plays Florence Fallon, a character also based on McPherson. Perhaps inspired by the Sharon Falconer of the novel, the producers of this movie have Sister Fallon almost die in a fire during a revival, but she is saved by her lover, a blind veteran of the Great War.
At the beginning of that movie, she is embittered by her father’s death and is talked into becoming a phony evangelist, milking the gullible for profit. To that end, her manager arranges to have plenty of shills pretend to be crippled, deformed, or impaired in some way, and then have them miraculously cured by Fallon.
In Lewis’s novel, Gantry and Falconer find that the show becomes more profitable when they add healing to the performance. Gantry even buys a bunch of crutches to put on display, supposedly collected from those who threw them away after being healed. The movie minimizes this feature. A man who is deaf is brought to Falconer one night. His wife says a storm woke him up one night, and he screamed that he could not hear the thunder. In other words, his deafness is psychosomatic rather than physiological. So, it is no wonder that Falconer is able to heal him with the power of suggestion. As a result, we are not asked to believe that a real miracle has occurred.
In The Miracle Woman, Fallon’s faith in God is restored. She quits the fraudulent business of being an evangelist and joins the Salvation Army. She receives a telegram from her lover saying that the doctors believe they might be able to cure his blindness. In other words, there will be no miracle restoring his sight, only medical science.
When we use the word “miracle” today, we typically mean that an unlikely but most fortunate event has occurred, not that God has intervened in the natural course of things. For most people, miracles in the strict sense of the word, in which the laws of nature have been overruled by divine intervention, belong to biblical antiquity, not the twentieth century. Although The Miracle Woman redeems Fallon at the end, bringing her back to God, thereby affirming the goodness of religion, it would have been too much to have her lover get his sight restored through an actual miracle. The movie would then have come across as phony, provoking derision from the audience.
Except for a brief appearance toward the end, Lefferts disappears from the novel after he leaves college, so he is not part of the story with Sister Falconer. Another character from early in the novel is Lulu, a naïve girl whom Gantry seduces. When her father finds out they have been having sex, a shotgun marriage is threatened. Gantry wiggles out of it, and she marries someone else. Years later, she shows up again, ready for seconds.
In the movie, Lulu, played by Shirley Jones, is given a different past. Her father caught her and Gantry having sex, after which Gantry left town and her father disowned her, forcing her to go into a life of prostitution. She wants revenge, setting up a situation entrapping Gantry. Lefferts is too upright to print the photos of their encounter in his newspaper, regarding them as part of a blackmail scheme, but they are made public in a tabloid. When Lulu sees how Gantry is pilloried, people throwing rotten food at him, she regrets what she has done, admitting in the newspaper that she framed him. He recovers from the scandal, but shortly after there is the fire.
There is a badger game worked on Gantry in the novel, but Lulu has nothing to do with it. Gantry gets out of it when a private detective presents the woman who set him up with information about her criminal past and how the police are still looking for her in Seattle, forcing her to recant her story and leave town with her husband.
Finally, there is the character of Elmer Gantry himself. As noted above, the opening scene in the movie takes place in a bar, where Gantry is drunk, on Christmas Eve no less. He is with some fellow salesmen, telling dirty jokes. A couple of women enter the bar asking for donations for poor orphans. They are sneered at by most of the men Gantry is with, but he intercedes on behalf of the women, pleading their cause and coercing his companions to donate. We suspect he is doing this more out of a desire to show off his rhetorical skills than out of concern for those orphans.
One of the salesmen he was joking around with balks when Gantry reaches for the plate of money intended to pay for his own drinks. Gantry replies:
What’s your beef, mister? You ashamed of being a Christian? I see. You think religion is for suckers and easy marks and mollycoddles, huh? You think Jesus was some kind of a sissy, eh? Let me tell you, Jesus wouldn’t be afraid to walk in here or any speakeasy to preach the gospel. Jesus had guts! He wasn't afraid of the whole Roman army. Think that quarterback’s hot stuff? Well, let me tell you, Jesus would have made the best little all-American quarterback in history. Jesus was a real fighter. The best little scrapper, pound for pound, you ever saw. And why, gentlemen? Love! Jesus had love in both fists.
At that point, he begins quoting Ingersoll, without attribution, of course.
I saw this movie when it first came out and again a little over ten years later on television. At the time, I figured it just made sense that a man with Burt Lancaster’s athletic build might say something like that.
But lately, I have become aware that masculine Christianity is something that has been around for a long time. Sure, I knew that white evangelicals had enthusiastically endorsed conservative politicians, and I have been hearing a lot recently from Republicans about masculinity and the patriarchal family, but I never really put the two together, thinking they were independent variables. Not even when I heard that a lot of young men are attracted to Orthodox Christianity in an effort to get away from the feminized versions of that religion found elsewhere did I catch on. Not even when I saw a picture of a musclebound Christ on the cross.
It all finally came together when I read Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez. She points out that support for Republicans on the part of white evangelicals and the emphasis conservatives place on masculinity are two aspects of a single movement, one with an extensive history, something that Lewis emphasized in his novel.
It is not surprising that something like that had to happen. Jesus may have preached to the weak, the poor, and the downtrodden, but once Christianity came to be embraced by the rich and powerful, his message needed to be adjusted accordingly.
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