Burt Lancaster, Jean Simmons, Shirley Jones
Written and directed by Richard Brooks
“Mister, I’ve been converted five times. Billy Sunday, Reverend Biederwolf, Gypsy Smith, and twice by Sister Falconer. I get terrible drunk, and then I get good and saved. Both of them done me a powerful lot of good.”
It’s a janitor who shares that bit of personal testimony with Elmer Gantry, and he’s one of the few truly honest people Gantry meets in the course of his adventures in religion. Not that Gantry is remotely honest himself. He’s a glad-hander – a natural born salesman – sly of eye and slick of hand, playing most everyone he meets for the sake of a fast buck or a willing woman.
Gantry finds naïve Christians particularly ripe for the pickin’, and he attaches himself to the tent revival crusades of Sister Falconer, a sincere believer in God and her own calling who’s nevertheless growing tired of the religious grind by the time slick Elmer sets his sights on her. She has no illusions at all about who and what he is – until she does. Until, like so many decent, straight-up people in this story, she finds herself falling under the irresistible sway of a man who knows human nature as well as he knows the Good Book.
Indeed, only two people have no illusions about Gantry – a rising writer and a fallen woman. The former is an eloquent agnostic whose minimal faith is oddly stirred by a man he knows is a charlatan. The woman, we learn, did not so much fall as let herself be pulled down by a younger Gantry. She has waited a long time for her vengeance – and is astonished to find this great con man unworthy of her own seductive shell game.
Elmer Gantry is not a film for believers faint-of-heart, or those disinclined to face some disturbing questions. What draws people to religion? What draws preachers to preach? What do we really want and expect from those we look to for spiritual leadership? Righteousness? Humility? Integrity? Or a really good show?
A key scene features Sister Falconer – a preacher, not a faith healer – confronted mid-service by a deaf man begging to be healed. She could send him away, but she doesn’t. Instead, she prays to be the instrument of his healing, and in that moment, an extraordinary cavalcade of emotions plays on her features: an arrogant confidence in her own ability to accomplish this … a sharp fear that she’ll fail, before this watching crowd … a genuine pity for the deaf man’s agony … a lust for the fame and money succeeding here will bring her … a simple desire to bring glory to God.
Does the Lord answer the half-corrupt prayers of such a person? Or the entreaties of a deaf man, who has no idea of her many, shifting motives? Is Gantry the darkest sinner in that revival tent – or the only one, at some level, who understands himself, and his God?
This is a film about the bad in good people, and the good in bad ones. And the difficulty most of us have in telling the difference … sometimes, even in ourselves.
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