Burt Lancaster acted in a number of excellent films during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Sacrilege is a word that was used often in the violent arguments that accompanied the publication in 1927 of Elmer Gantry. Shortly after the publication of Elmer Gantry, H. G. Wells published a widely syndicated newspaper article called "The New American People", in which he largely based his observations of American culture on Lewis' novels. With the characterization and strong personalities of these two characters, it is easy to assume a one-sided relationship between Gantry and Falconer and their congregants, but this is not the case. Did he come to bring peace or more war? The novel's protagonist, the Reverend Dr. Elmer Gantry, is initially attracted by booze and easy money (though he eventually renounces tobacco and alcohol) and chasing women. We're confident we succeeded and have no doubt you'll agree. She engages in worthy activities at the church in Banjo Crossing, and falls in love with Elmer. Lewis, C.S. It begins as a satire of revivalism: Elmer is thrown out of a Baptist seminary, becomes a farm implement salesman, and then finds his nicheor pedestalas a Billy Sunday partnered with an Aimee Semple McPherson. Like Sharon, she drew huge crowds and practiced faith healing. The couple abandons their campaign against Elmer and leave This is tantamount to an admission that the church is happy to receive money that is tainted by the very practices it denounces so vehemently. Thus equipped, Elmer advances to conquer the world. If a satirist depicts the object of his satire as based on humbug, advocated by humbug, and defended by humbug, he must employ a great deal of wit and fantasy to prevent his attack from seeming cross-grained and peevish. Elmer gets converted to Christianity only because he cannot resist the pressures put on him to do so. But in the house of Elmers mistress, Lulu Bains, they sing and read Seeing Nelly Home, Old Black Joe, Beulah Land, Farm and Fireside, and Modern Priscilla. Gantrys pugnacious sermons quickly make him popular in Zenith, but the workload soon overwhelms him and alienates him from Cleo. Gantry, why dont you believe in God?. He thereby makes a defiant gesture, nonetheless, somewhat apart from his customary preoccupation with quixotic heroes whom he could admire for their protests, rebellion, and search for freedom. She is also a pious churchgoer who has always wanted Elmer to become a preacher. The angriest of Lewiss novels, Elmer Gantry seems to arise from impulses that invert the quixotic. Matthew Gregory Lewis NATIONALITY: British Novels for Students. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful." -- Albert Schweitzer According to Mark Schorer, in his introduction to Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays, No novel in the history of American literature outraged its audience so completely, and very few novels in American literature had a larger immediate audience. The book was banned in Boston and other cities and denounced from hundreds of pulpits. And yet Im not a liar! date the date you are citing the material. In The Master, Joaquin Phoenix plays an alcoholic failure who falls in thrall to cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were many evangelists, like Elmer and Sharon Falconer in the novel, who traveled around the country conducting revival campaigns for large audiences. Excerpt from Babbitt But unlike Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantrys rise is depicted negatively. 12630. Higher criticism was a method of Biblical criticism that originated in Germany. It tells of people in troubled times trying to sort out life's essential challenges. It is easy to see why Burt Lancaster won an oscar for his excellent portrayal of Elmer Gantry. Simmons is too wispy, and her plummy accent slips through and jars this very American story.
Elmer Gantry Script So, I'll give him the credit and assume he was just playing his role, not hamming it up too much as it often appears. The church filled him with awe, frightened him, became the center of all his emotions. As he gains experience, Elmer attempts to broaden his mind. Elmer thinks he is fat and pompous, but respects him nonetheless. After exposing the professors secret, After North invites him to lecture for Napap, Elmer is filled with ambition to combine all the moral organizations in America, with himself as the leader. Your email address will not be published. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.
Elmer Gantry (DVD, 2001, Vintage Classics Gantry is an over-the-top opportunistic traveling salesman who teams up with evangelist Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons) to promote religion in 1920's America. The merit of this argument is undermined because it is given by Babbitt, not out of caring for the citizens of Zenith, but rather because he stands to gain the most financially from the revival. "Elmer Gantry" can be considered the quintessential exploration into the omnipresent duality existing between a person's religious faith and simultaneous character defects. The one completely positive character in the book, Frank Shallard, wants to make Christianity an active force for social good; as it is, it is a negative force, a threat to freedom. Continuity mistake: At the end, there is a scene in a burning church. In the novel, people in Nebraska say that Sharon Falconer compares with the great evangelists of the past, naming Gipsy Smith as one of them. Go out slowly! The acting and directing is superb to the point that it becomes difficult to remember that it is only a movie. Cecil Aylston is Sharon Falconers assistant. Mel Gibson aside, you don't expect to see a sympathetic portrayal of religion in the movies; from 'Night of the Hunter' onwards, the dodgy preacher has been a more common character than the saintly one, and there's another kicking for the born-again movement in 'Elmer Gantry'. It is not merely a case of the good priest versus the bad priest. TAKE NOTE: The films opening title sequence includes this advice: Due to the highly controversial nature of this film, we strongly urge you to prevent impressionable children from seeing it!, You can read the full Sinclair Lewis novel Elmer Gantry online at Project Gutenberg Australia, here:http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300851h.html, You might want to watch some Patti Pagemaybe Whatever Lola Wants, here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSsH_i6xpf8. 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. 2023 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Elmers next position is at a church in Monarch. He goes to Mizpah Seminary, where he entertains his classmates with tales of his sexual escapades. Still the supporting cast is brilliant as well. For some reason Richard Brooks seemed to think of himself as the man best suited to turning great novels and plays into films, but if the results were at best entertaining ("The Brothers Karamazov", "Cat on a hot tin roof") they tended to fall far short of the originals. As a preacher, he shamelessly plays on peoples emotions and their fear of Hell. One should imagine instead, I think, that she might have the same great-grandaddy as President Lyndon Baines Johnson: Baptist preacher George Baines. Lewis finished the book while mending a broken leg on Jackfish Island in Rainy Lake, Minnesota. The result is a novel that satirically represents the religious activity of America in evangelistic circles and the attitudes of the 1920s toward it. [5], However, the book was a commercial success. Her main supporter is worldly William Morgan (Dean Jagger) who believes in Falconer, and sees Gantry and Lefferts for the opportunistic impediments they are. McPherson preached in southern California from 1918 to the 1940s. Schorer discusses Lewiss research for the novel, including the clergyman he met in Kansas City. He cribs some passages from a book and then gives a rousing sermon. Later he was to learn that references to Dickens, Victor Hugo, James Whitcomb Riley, Josh Billings, and Michelangelo give a sermon a very toney Chicago air. Though he does not have quixotic benignity, helpfulness, or idealism, he does have visions of how the ministry can be useful to him; he sees thousands listening to himinvited to banquets and everything , and he dreams of hundreds of beautiful women [who weep] with conviction and rush down to clasp his hand., In addition to his hypocrisy and his ignorance, Elmer is a liar, a sinner, and a coward. 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.
AFI|Catalog - American Film Institute He hires a new secretary, Hettie Dowler, who replaces Lulu as his mistress. Before Falconer and Gantry set up their revival in Zenith, a large city which is described as a place where Falconer and Gantry can become famous, Falconers revivals were held in the country and in small towns. Elmer Gantry is a satirical novel written by Sinclair Lewis in 1926 that presents aspects of the religious activity of America in fundamentalist and evangelistic circles and the attitudes of the 1920s public toward it.
pat hingle elevator accident One such character is the dean of Terwillinger College, who makes a brief appearance in chapter 4, section 3, in which he wonders, in conversation with his wife, whether he has sacrificed too much by going into the ministry. Gantry is portrayed as a smooth talking but frustrated salesman, struggling to make a living. At the end of the novel, Elmer is on bended knee, praying, We shall yet make these United States moral nation! The irony in Elmers last statement underscores the immorality of the kind of enforced morality Elmer has in mind. WebElmer Gantry. Start your 48-hour free trial to get access to more than 30,000 additional guides and more than 350,000 Homework Help questions answered by our experts. Gantry threatens to avenge him but takes no action. Judson Roberts is an evangelist who is the state secretary of the Y.M.C.A. The purpose of Napap is to make life conform to the ideals agreed upon by the principal Christian Protestant denominations. This would be accomplished by combining into one association all the moral organizations in Americathe Anti-Saloon League, the Lords Day Alliance, the Watch and Ward Society, and the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Moralsand then lobbying for legislated morality. I'm sure back in 1960, this film must have been pretty controversial, shocking and challenging in its portrayal of evangelistic religion as cynical, money-grabbing and being as much about show business as God. WebMemorable Moments. On the trip to his new church, he gets drunk and carouses with women; he is discovered and is dismissed from the seminary. The last date is today's His dissatisfaction with his life, as well as his drinking, lying, and philandering give the audience a portrait of an unsavory man. There are glimmers of this in Sister Sharon Falconer, like when she admits that she knows Gantry is lying but allows him to continue preaching because she believes it is for the greater good. But he had never encountered vice . 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. . Nashville Opera production directed by John Hoomes, conducted by William Boggs. Earthy and real, she and Elmer both sing the hymn Im on My Way, a sort of religious counterpart to I Did It My Way. Elmer romances her only as a way to Sharon, but Rachel is the woman Elmer should have gone with. Fired from the ministry after going drinking rather than contacting his new church, he works for two years as a traveling salesman. We are going to find the golden Scriptures written in our own hearts, we are going to sing together, laugh together, rejoice together like a gathering of April brooks, rejoice that in us is living the veritable spirit of the Everlasting and Redeeming Christ Jesus!, Declining from this spirituality, she gives her gospel-crew a pep talk: lets hit people hard for money-pledges. It is not so much that he does not believe in God. 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. He welcomes Elmer into the Methodist church. Id sell anything.. Burt Lancaster is bold and provocative as the title character who is preaching to you one moment and drunk and surly the other. When she overhears Gantry seducing their pianist, she fires them, but Gantry convinces her to reconsider. She teaches classes in Concentration, Prosperity, Love, Metaphysics and Oriental Mysticism, and invites Elmer to join her. In Lincoln, he persuades her to let him speak at the meeting about how he, a businessman, was converted. Shortly Frank meets more of real life than he is prepared for. However as the pressure builds to tear him down, can Gantry prevent his past from returning to haunt him? Sin, sin, sin! Box sets galore! Burt Lancaster's Oscar Winning performance in the title role was well-worth the accolades. Gene Warren and Tim Baar, The Time Machine. His quest for God is a secular quest. The main purpose of the picaresque novel (a modern example of which is Saul Bellows The Adventures of Augie March), is satire. Later judgments have also been mixed. He was supposed to bring peace to mankind. Interviewing key stakeholders in the company, gathering and organizing information, analyzing data and preparing reports that summarize finding. The steady accumulation of damning portraits of those whose spiritual home is the Protestant church, and the lack of any serious counterweight to them, led Rebecca West, in a hostile review of Elmer Gantry that first appeared in 1927, to write that Lewis lacked the necessary requirement of the satirist, which was to fully possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others. Wests point was that Lewis effectively exposes the charlatans and the way they misuse their power, but fails to show how that religious power might better be used.
End Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list.
Elmer Gantry (film He joins up with Mrs. Evans Riddle, who teaches New Thought, a Westernized version of Indian religion. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. He is a well-educated Englishman in his early thirties with a colorful past. Real name: David Terry. Or maybe as something more. Elmer Gantry and Sister Sharon Falconer, the two main religious leaders of the film, are portrayed as morally dubious though Gantry has a small redemption and Falconer clearly truly believes in her cause. Elmer Gantry appears as a minor character in two later, lesser-known Lewis novels: The Man Who Knew Coolidge and Gideon Planish. Its a movie about driving passions so hot and strongfor a sale, for salvationthey burn a person up. Pursuing a career as a freelance writer, Lewis began to produce fiction with ease and ingenuity, and he published five novels from 1912 to 1919. The incident is not strictly necessary for the plot, and Leffertss father never appears in the novel again. ." WebIn 1960, Elmer Gantry, based on the best-selling 1927 novel by Sinclair Lewis, was brought to the screen by writer/director Richard Brooks. Frank Shallard is a student at Mizpah Theological Seminary, but he doubts the literal truth of the Bible. , Sinclair Lewis and the Method of Half-Truths, in Society and Self in the Novel, Columbia University Press, 1956, pp. One thing he is aware of is that professing belief serves his purposes very well, and for all he knows, every word of Baptist or Methodist dogma might be true.
Elmer Gantry: The Trap of Hypocrisy and Greed - Studying A Best Actor Oscar went to Burt Lancaster for his outstanding performance as a con-man-turned-preacher in this provocative indictment of religious corruption. "Religion and Sports: Three Muscular Christians in American Literature". Introduction of Gantry Girder.
Elmer Gantry He looks stern and Elmer is afraid of him. publication online or last modification online. Elmer is so infatuated with Sharon that he gives up smoking and drinking for her. A novel set from 1920 to 1922 in Zenith, an imaginary midwestern American city; published in 1922. WebA second-division British psychedelic band with a tangled history, Elmer Gantry & the Velvet Opera recorded a couple of albums in the Pink Floyd/Soft Machine/Tomorrow/Nice mold in the late '60s without coming close to establishing a solid identity of their own. Gantrys mother is a strict fundamentalist, so Gantry spent much of his childhood in church, where he learned the dour lifestyle of a Christian. He is invited by a group of scholars to go on a lecture tour to oppose religious fundamentalism, but his first lecture, in a city in the southwest, he is interrupted by local toughs. Encyclopedia.com. Shirley Jones won Best Supporting Actress for her role as the preachers daughter turned prostitute. Watching it today, it is hard to be surprised by any such suggestion since my cynical generation is much more accepting that nothing is what it seems and everyone has an agenda. Connected to this it must be said that I did think the plot was a little thin at times and the strength of film does lie in the general portrayal of the world rather than the nitty-gritty of any one character or thread (although even the thin bits are pretty good). In a very Elmer Gantry moment, starting at 2:54, after singing the Lord gave us two good hands, brothers and sisters, one for the givin and one for the takin, Should creationism be taught in public schools?
Tries to give the kid a break. Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth century literature. The tents are filled with people clamoring to see Sister Sharon Falconer. But Sharon stands by Elmer and truth prevails, until both are seduced by fame and blind faith over common sense, and fate deals them a crushing blow. The Allegory of Lov, Lewis, Sinclair Why does Lewis include him in the book? I am really and truly sanctified!
1961 Meanwhile, Babe Ruth was closing in on the home run record. For the most part they are hypocrites, not even believing the doctrines they preach to their congregations every week. Already a member? But it all comes to an end one night in Clontar, on the New Jersey coast, where Sharon has purchased a pier. She's a true believer. 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. When Elmer is converted, Jim moves out of his room in disgust. Liking the idea of having power over an audience, Elmer convinces himself he has been called to the ministry. Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Starring Shirley Jones Arthur Kennedy Burt Lancaster Patti Page Jean Simmons. Juanita Klauzel is Elmers girlfriend in Cato, Missouri, when he is a student at Terwillinger College. During his Yale career Lewis also traveled widely, including a trip to England working on a cattle boat, and he also lived in the Utopian colony at Englewood, New Jersey, which was founded by the novelist Upton Sinclair. It was both a popular and critical success, selling 295,000 copies in the first year. Elmer would probably not be able to answer this question. Even Gantry wouldnt have been such a bad fellow if hed been, say, a salesman. Only a very curious moral outlook could have permitted the creator of such a monster as Elmer Gantry to say that his characters lack of a sense of decency would not have been objectionable if he had changed his profession . I think she does a brilliant job but I wished that she had more speaking moments. Napap would bring about nationwide censorship of novels, plays, paintings, and movies. Traveling with the show is Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Jim Lefferts, who looks at the show and Elmer with a critical eye, although Sister Sharon, William, and Elmer welcome him. Eddie is an enthusiastic Christian who becomes a student at Mizpah Theological Seminary and later a minister in western Kansas. He badgers her until she allows him to preach. He fell in love with Sharon when he first met her, and is devoted to her. Lewis researched the novel by observing the work of various preachers in Kansas City in his so-called "Sunday School" meetings on Wednesdays. WebElmer Gantry was a labor of love for Brooks, who had dreamed of filming Lewis's novel for more than a decade and spent two years writing the script, which won the Oscar for Best Higher criticism also showed that some elements in the Bible were also found in other religions and mythologies (the virgin birth, for example). Ferguson, Charles W., Review of Elmer Gantry, in Critical Essays on Sinclair Lewis, edited by Martin Bucco, G. K. Hall, 1986, pp. Mrs. Evans Riddle is the proprietor of the Victory Thought Power Headquarters in New York. Elmer Gantry may have a rather unsavoury past but the one thing he can do better than anyone is sell himself, pots, pans, anything. Binch is also a snob who has contempt for other preachers. Named himself in honour of the character in the Burt Lancaster movie Elmer Gantry. Elmer Gantry subtitles. Dont be afraid! Yet through it all, he is awarded ecclesiastical advancement, even though he barely escapes ruin at the conclusion of the novel when one of his secretaries, Hettie Dowler, tries to blackmail him. He marries Cleo but gets bored with her and resents her lack of sexual passion. In the Shadow of No Future: Justice Claims and the Israel-Palestine Conflict? He ends up as minister of a large church in a West Virginia mining town. The sociological factor that works against Elmer is the entire small-town Protestant environment in which he was raised. If there are three dates, the first date is the date of the original Source: James Lundquist, Moralities for a New Time, in Sinclair Lewis, Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1973, pp. eNotes.com, Inc. Traveling in the Southwest, he is beaten and blinded. He is immediately Cleo Benham is the high-minded daughter of Nathaniel Benham. It's sophisticated script, complex characters, and wonderful acting opened a whole new world for me. But for my money it is Jean Simmonds, surely robbed of her own Oscar here, who has the most impressive part. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/elmer-gantry, "Elmer Gantry Schorer analyzes the novels lack of conflict and dramatic counterpoint; there are no obstacles to Elmers success, since the good characters are weak and play only peripheral roles and there are no competing orders of value, since everything is corrupt. Elmer meets up again with Lulu, now married to Floyd Naylor, and they resume their flirtation. Drama. Later, in the middle of a church service, Gantry realizes that he misses Hettie but quickly spots a new choir member whom he hopes to get to know better. Those who believe in the doctrines of the church are presented as fools or morons, and are easy targets for malicious fun. Especially ironic is the way he champions love, an emotion he seems incapable of, in his sermons, preaches against ambition, when he himself is so patently ambitious, and organizes crusades against (mainly sexual) immorality, when he has difficulty resisting sexual temptation himself. It might seem that the last thing in the world Lewis wanted was sympathy for Elmer Gantry, whom he regarded, he told Allen Austin years later, as a hypocrite through and through. Yet he wrote in the Nation in 1928, Actually, I like the Babbitts, the Dr. Pickerbaughs, the Will Kennicotts, and even the Elmer Gantrys rather better than anyone else on earth. Furthermore, he told Betty Stevens that the Babbitts were my children and I wanted to reform them. He is tested by temptation and almost capitulates, but is then wrongly accused by the jilted temptress.
Leap Of Faith In the following essay excerpt, Lundquist suggests that Lewis portrays religion as stifling, as a manifestation of the pioneer mentality that characterized the old American and has become a threat to the new American. The new Wellspring Church has been built, and Elmer is awarded an honorary doctorate from Abernathy College. Mrs. Gantry is Elmers mother. Elmer reads Browning, Tennyson, Dickens. Elmer is the great man steadily making his way upward in the worldthe man of immoderate personal ambitionand the great man hasnt time for scruples. You're all sinners! 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. Later, Lewis will show Elmer no mercy, but at this stage his target is not so much the soon-to-be preacher but the social and psychological context in which he is formed. Although it's difficult to know if Gantry's spiritual motivation is genuine or merely a ploy, throughout the film, one is kept guessing. Lewiss first real success came with Main Street (1920), the book that made him famous. It is the hour! Prayings the cheapest first-rate medicine I know, he says. He is influenced by the atheistic Dr. Zechlin who lends him theological works by liberals and skeptics. In a notable passage Lewis tells us sympathetically of the problems of the rebel, of the preacher or the writer who suffers from sensitivity and innocence: He was supposed to cure an affliction called vice. In Elmer Gantry Lewis suggested that what is wrong with the small town, what is wrong with business practices, and even what is wrong with the intellectual attitudes that make it difficult for the scientist to go about his research honestly are all due to the hold Protestantism has on American consciousness. Even the physical description of Binch is calculated to evoke disgust: Dr. Fired from the Seminary, he is hired as a traveling salesman of farm implements. There is a definite give and take between Gantry and Falconer and the congregants in Elmer Gantry. She tells Elmer that she has visions; God talks to her. When the pious Eddie leaves the room, all they want to talk about is sex. "Elmer Gantry", directed by Richard Brooks, is one of his best.