Elmer Gantry

US (1960): Drama

Only a portion of Nobel Prize-winner Sinclair Lewis' once-notorious 1927 novel was used for this film adaptation, but since it's the portion in which the evangelizing protagonist sheds his hypocrisy for sincerity, it was enough to appeal to star Burt Lancaster. Elmer Gantry (Lancaster), a drunken, dishonest street preacher allegedly patterned on Billy Sunday, wangles a job with the travelling tent ministry conducted by Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons). Thanks to Gantry's enthusiastic hellfire-and-brimstone sermons, Sister Sharon's operation rises to fame and fortune, enough so that Sharon realizes her dream of building her own enormous tabernacle. These ambitions are put in jeopardy when a prostitute (Shirley Jones), a former minister's daughter who'd been deflowered by Gantry years earlier, lures Gantry into a compromising situation and has photographs taken. He survives this setback, and Sister Sharon is able to construct her tabernacle. On opening night, Sharon, who has always wondered whether or not her healing powers were real or if they were just the results of wishful thinking, seemingly effects a genuine cure for a crippled parishioner.

It took several years for any Hollywood studio to take a chance with Lewis' hot-potato novel, and when it finally did arrive on the screen, producer/director Richard Brooks was compelled to downplay the more "sacrilegious" passages in the original. Even so, Elmer Gantry was considered raw meat in 1960, so much so that United Artists, anticipating the much-later MPAA ratings system, decreed that no one under 16 could attend the film unless accompanied by an adult. Also appearing in Elmer Gantry are Arthur Kennedy as the obligatory H.L. Mencken-style atheistic journalist, Dean Jagger as Sister Sharon's manager, and Edward Andrews as George Babbitt, a character borrowed from another Sinclair Lewis novel. (Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide)

When this film first ran on network TV, the entire subplot featuring Shirley Jones in her Academy Award^®-winning performance as Lulu Bains, the prostitute, was chopped out of the movie because it clashed so violently with her role as the wholesome mom on TV's "The Partridge Family".

 View the original theatrical trailer for this film on YouTube.com.

5 nominations, 3 Awards