“The Lord helps those who help themselves.” This was a saying I grew up hearing all my life. I also remember seeing editorial cartoons depicting the faith-based man who stood on the roof of his house during a great flood and turned away rescue boats and helicopters, insisting instead that God would save him. When he drowned and went into the afterlife, God pointed out to this man that it was He who sent the boats and helicopters. God’s miracles are not always flashy or easy to identify as miracles. Sometimes they are as simple as the changing of a heart. Sometimes our own stubborn insistence that we know the will and mind of God can lead us off that straight and narrow path to salvation. Sometimes the miracle is getting on that boat or helicopter, or getting out of a burning building instead of staying in place, insisting that God will save you.
It’s hard to review a faith-based movie without having a faith-based background. A Biblical picture like The Ten Commandments can be judged as a work of fiction, of course, but a movie about religion itself, complete with a moralizing message, can be interpreted as self-serving if you are an atheist or agnostic. It takes a fine line to make such a film appeal to a wider audience. Elmer Gantry attempted to do just that, using the 1927 novel of the same name by Sinclair Lewis as a starting point. The novel is a satire of the fundamentalist and evangelistic circles in America in the 1920s, specifically the rise of faith healers and self-proclaimed prophets. While this story works on a satirical level, it also works as a legitimate morality tale. There is a lesson that can be learned from the pages of this book and from the film that came from it.
An evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit. I’m paraphrasing the Bible there, but what that basically means is that a bad person cannot bring forth goodness. This seems to conflict with “All things serve the will of God,” but perhaps this is something that is purely beyond our understanding. After all, in the case of Elmer Gantry (Burt Lancaster), he brings a lot of people into the flock despite being a hard-drinking, smooth-talking traveling salesman with a taste for fast women. He uses the Bible to add fervor into his sales pitches as a way to increase sales and bring in more profit.
Early into the film, he is attracted towards the evangelical roadshow of Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons), whose revivalist saintly aura intrigues him. As the troupe is preparing to leave town for Kansas, he sweet-talks her assistant, Sister Rachel (Patti Page), into disclosing information about Sister Falconer’s past, which he uses to con his way into her good graces, allowing him to join her troupe and preaching about being a saved salesman.
Together, the two form a good-cop/bad cop routine where he preaches hellfire and damnation and she follows with offering salvation through repentance. This brings them to the attention of the church council in Zenith, Winnemac, a larger city. Falconer’s manager, Bill Morgan (Dean Jagger), feels that she is not ready to step outside the small venues, but Gantry convinces her to go to Zenith. There, they meet with the church leaders, most of whom are weary of the idea of turning religion into a spectacle as Gantry does. He convinces them by pandering to their pocketbooks, showing that the church must earn money to stay open, which requires potential members to be won over by him.
Sister Falconer dreams of moving out of the traveling revival tents and into a permanent building, something she believes Elmer can make possible. Though she is attracted to him, she spurns his advances for a time, not wanting to jeopardize their business relationship. This eventually falls, though, and she allows him to take her virginity. Further complications arise when Elmer stages a rousing out of the local prostitutes as a broad show of his and Falconer’s commitment to clean the streets of sin. One of the prostitutes is Lulu (Shirley Jones), a woman he is well acquainted with from his past. Lulu arranges to meet him later and frames him with misleading photos that she sells to the newspapers. This scandal nearly derails everything Sister Falconer has built. But while this problem eventually is resolved, another one far more deadly is soon to happen.
I would like to say that this is a story about redemption through the power of faith, but Elmer Gantry is not Jonas Nightengale from Leap of Faith. He is a conman at the beginning of the film, using his charisma to force roughians in a bar to donate money to a Christian-based charity, and he is a conman in the end as he walks away from the disaster that brings this film to its close. But that’s not to say he is not a changed man by the end of the picture. His experiences with Sister Falconer have moved him and there is the real sense that he has come to love her a bit. The real question, though, is does he love money even more?
Burt Lancaster is at his smarmy best when he is driving congregations into a frothy rage with his fiery sermons. Burt is very convincing as a man who understands human behavior and how to manipulate them into doing whatever he wants. In the end, though, we’re never quite certain what he really believes. He can quote the Bible but does so to serve his own purposes. This movie was accused of targeting evangelicals but it is actually going after false prophets, not evangelicals in general.
Elmer may be preying on the gullible and the desperate, but he is no more calculating than Sister Falconer is. She represents the truly spiritual, yet when Elmer is blackmailed, she is more than willing to pay the money to protect her own image. This is a complicated character that we are not to look too harshly upon, despite her flaws and ambitions. Her goal to have her own physical church building comes before doing the right thing, and that is a slippery slope to be going down. There is no doubt that she believes what she is preaching, but it also puts her in a position in the end where she puts her faith before actions, and it costs her everything.
This film was controversial at the time, but it really shouldn’t have been. It has a good Christian message to it despite the lead being a conman. Burt Lancaster is giving one of the finest, most over-the-top performances of his career here, and it is a pure delight to bask in his on-screen charisma. We know he is a scoundrel, but, like those in the congregation, we cannot help but be swept up in his energy. We also feel bad when the crowd turns on him over the photos with Lulu because we know the truth behind those photos. He cons us, too, with his wit, charm, and street smarts. It’s an effective con, too, because he succeeds in taking us for this ride for a full two and a half hours with us enjoying it the whole time.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Motion Picture: Bernard Smith
Best Actor: Burt Lancaster (won)
Best Supporting Actress: Shirley Jones (won)
Best Screenplay - Based on Materials from Another Medium: Richard Brooks (won)
Best Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture: André Previn
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Release Date: June 29, 1960
Running Time: 146 minutes
Rated PG
Starring: Burt Lancaster, Jean Simmons, Dean Jagger, Arthur Kennedy, Shirley Jones, and Patti Page
Directed by: Richard Brooks
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