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. The movie is based on the 1927 novel of the same name by Minnesotas own Nobel Prizewinning author, Sinclair Lewis. Dr. Howard Bancock Binch is a prominent Baptist who defends the literal interpretation of the Bible in his writings. An example is the bizarre marriage ceremony which takes place between Elmer and evangelist Sharon Falconer before her grotesque shrine. Thus equipped, Elmer advances to conquer the world. The church provided all the music he ever heard, his only oratory except for campaign speeches by politicians, all his painting and sculpture, and all his philosophic ideas. Jim Lefferts is Elmers roommate and his only friend at Terwillinger College. The publication day of Elmer Gantry found him wandering through Europe with Ramon Guthrie; from Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, he commented in the most innocent tones on the stir he had caused: The violent Kansas City blokes have been asinine. Bess Needham marries Frank Shallard and bears him three children. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Copyright 2022 The University of Alabama Elmer Gantry: Sin. Elmer Gantry was raised by his mother, a staunch Baptist, in the small town of Paris, Kansas. Burt Lancaster gives a fierce, bellicose and frightening performance as a salesman turned preacher, brining religion to the people in this screen adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel. 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. Known as the enfant terrible of the Methodist church, he is ruthlessly critical of others. After Sharon dismisses him in favor of Elmer, Cecil tries to conduct a rescue mission in Buffalo. Sharon Falconer is an equally striking example of his satiric power. One admirable character, Frank Shallard, makes an essentially quixotic response to Elmer and his deceits. She is forced by her father to marry Lloyd Naylor. ." But both the show and their relationship are threatened when one of Gantry's ex-lovers decides that she must settle a score with the charismatic performer. The ships captain who in the storm took counsel with the orphaned but righteous child of missionaries in Zomballa. According to such people: A proper school should teach nothing but bookkeeping, agriculture, geometry, dead languages made deader by leaving out all the amusing literature, and the Hebrew Bible as interpreted by men superbly trained to ignore contradictions, men technically called Fundamentalists., Christian beliefs about the proper observance of Sundays also comes under heavy satirical fire in this passage: [T]he Maker of a universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.. Shallard is then attacked by religious fanatics and blinded. 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. One might say that on matters of truth, he is neutral; he is not a believer or a nonbeliever. Yet at the fire, it is Sharon who is heroic. He possesses none of the cardinal virtues and many of the cardinal sins. Gantry considers Shallards company an obstacle to his plans with Lulu, so he engineers Shallards resignation with accusations of apostasy. But shifting moods again, she can acknowledge that she is just an ignorant young woman with a lot of misdirected energyand even an evil one: Oh, I hate the little vicessmoking, swearing, scandal, drinking just enough to be silly. 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. Elmer of course towers above everyone else in the novel. Encyclopedia.com. We didn't want to make just any bourbon--we wanted to make the best bourbon. 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. WebIf he is not completely redeemed at the film's end, he indicates that his love for the ill-fated Sharon Falconer is real and not mere lust.The character of Sister Falconer, as played by 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. Many of the people attending the revivals would then be working-class individuals. D. J. Dooley remarks that to Lewis Christianity is not only untrue, but inconceivable. Dooley feels that Elmer Gantry is flawed because it is neither a realistic portrayal of the state of religion in America nor a caricature whose manifest unfairness can be forgiven because of the wit and humor which have gone into it. True, unless, taking our cue from Sharon Falconer and the multitude of fraudulent evangelistic minor characters in the book, we begin to see Elmer Gantry as Lewiss triumphant depiction of a land of demons and grotesques of all sizes and shapes, created from the extremes of human impulse and incapable of self-awareness because they are already beyond it, Elmer included. His ambition knows no bounds. Firearm Discussion and Resources from AR-15, AK-47, Handguns and more! His decision to enter the ministry is dishonest and contrary to his own nature, and it costs him the respect and friendship of his agnostic college roommate, Jim Lefferts. | 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. He uses the church to further his own ambitions for power and fame. When Gantry is framed as a philanderer, both Falconer and Gantry endure the wrath of an angry public in Zenith, but are quickly restored to their pedestals upon a retraction. This tended to undermine the uniqueness of Christianity and the literal interpretation of the Bible. The Pilgrim's Regress (1933) Later judgments have also been mixed. When he teams up with evangelist Sister Falconer, he sells religion from a tent to 1920's America, helping Falconer with her aim of getting out of the tent into her own temple and building a proper congregation. He hires a new secretary, Hettie Dowler, who replaces Lulu as his mistress. McPherson preached in southern California from 1918 to the 1940s. Another minor character who serves as one small brick in the vast anti-clerical edifice that is Elmer Gantry is Dr. Howard Bancock Binch, a renowned defender of the literal truth of the Bible. When Elmer joins evangelist Sharon Falconer, he supplies poetry for her sermons, using Ella Wheeler Wilcox, James Whitcomb Riley, and Thomas Moore, with philosophy from Ralph Waldo Trine. The famous evangelist Billy Sunday called Lewis Satans cohort.. He preaches at the service that gets Elmer converted. Garrison After several years as a travelling salesman of farm equipment, he becomes manager for Sharon Falconer, an itinerant evangelist. In another service a couple comes forward to ask that Falconer cure the husbands deafness. The result would be the fascist state against which Babbitt, in anticipation of 1984, warns. Nevertheless, it is possible to recognize the working of quixotic elements throughout the novel, especially in the fancifully conceived Sharon Falconer and in the character who is a foil for Elmer, Frank Shallard. But it's Elmer's past, which catches up with him in Zenith, that may be his, and by association Sister Sharon's, downfall. . TRIVIA: Six degrees of Star TrekThe six degrees of Star Trek holds that any movie connects to Star Trek within 6 steps. 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. Was a member of the of the bogus Fleetwood Mac band, that the then manager Clifford Davis send on a US tour in 1974 when the real Fleetwood Mac rejected the tour. If there are three dates, the first date is the date of the original Lewis seems determined to avoid religious discrimination: all sects appear in equally bad light. 2023 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. William's business plan has been for the show to set up in small towns, so it's against his wishes that Sister Sharon, falling for Elmer, agrees to Elmer's plan to set up in the larger city of Zenith, where William feels the that the scrutiny of the cynical urban populace will hurt their brand. Gantrys fame continues to grow, and he is soon preaching at churches across America. Burt Lancaster in all his "scene chewing" glory. Sign In 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. Lewiss version of what passed for religion in the United States of the 1920s brought him threats against his life and gave his name the same rhetorical function in Protestant fundamentalist sermons as that of Clarence Darrow, Darwin, and the devil himself. The result is as discouraging, as horrifying, as it would have been if Huck had been converted by Miss Watsons Bible stories. Lancaster is absolutely mesmerizing as "Elmer Gantry." Elmer Gantry begins in 1902. These help her to put on a dramatic show that wins many converts. However, these were exercises in popular, rather than literary, fiction. Nelson Manfred Blake, "How to Learn History from Sinclair Lewis and Other Uncommon Sources". Binch is also a snob who has contempt for other preachers. Disappointingly though, Pengillys arguments do not rise above the commonplace. 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. Even the physical description of Binch is calculated to evoke disgust: Dr. She even tells Elmer (who falls for her the instant he sees her) that she is the reincarnation of Joan of Arc, although she later admits that she does not really believe this. He dies in a gambling den. 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. Despite this though the film is still quite engaging and enjoyable as it delves into this world with a certain amount of glee; the fact that it peels off this world to look at Gantry specifically is a bit of a shame because it cuts under that focus a little. Anative of the midwestern United States, Sinclair Lewis (18851951) chronicled through novels, THE LITERARY WORK The film is beautifully visual and as Elmer Gantry's past comes haunting again to tarnish the tent revival and watch Gantry and Sister Sharon fall again. But they could be healed constantly, and of the same disease.. She was reported missing after swimming off Venice Beach, California, turning up five weeks later in Mexico, claiming she had been kidnapped. Elmer starts his career as a Baptist and then joins up with a charismatic but equally unprincipled female revivalist preacher. WebHollywood legend Burt Lancaster nabbed a Best Actor Oscar as glad-handing, soul-redeeming charlatan Elmer Gantry, a huckster who spins his talent for preaching into a mtier behind the pulpit. 11744. The citation above will include either 2 or 3 dates. Concerning about some preachers exact wealth and power from their congregration . Gantrys mother is a strict fundamentalist, so Gantry spent much of his childhood in church, where he learned the dour lifestyle of a Christian. The portrayal of revivals as a necessary service with a precarious balance between helping and hurting both the revivals leaders and attendants is masterful. Don Pickens is Frank Shallards roommate at Mizpah Theological Seminary. Driven by ambition to become a bishop, he is hugely successful, and is given bigger and bigger churches. When it comes to incarceration rates, Minnesota stands out as one of the few states who is experiencing an increase in their prison population despite prison overcrowding and crime at a 50-year low. WebElmer Gantry is a fast-talking, hard-drinking traveling salesman who always has a risqu story and a hip flask to entertain cronies and customers alike. WebElmer turns to Rigg for help, who hires a detective to dig up incriminating evidence against Hettie and her husband. John K. Roth. He returns to it in the context of Sharons revival meetings. At the church, Elmer tries to seduce Lulu Bains, the daughter of one of the deacons, while Shallard warns him against even the appearance of evil. Tracing two years in th, Matthew Gregory Lewis For the most part, he does not create complex human portraits but caricatures. Charles W. Ferguson, in the Bookman, described Elmer Gantry as a glorious lampoon, although he also commented that the novel was a social commentary and not a work of fictional art. Lit by fire, Lancaster (Elmer Gantry) preaches to a crowd. But it all comes to an end one night in Clontar, on the New Jersey coast, where Sharon has purchased a pier. WebWhen 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. Then read chapter 30, section 5, where Jim reappears. Elmer is beset on all sides; his mother, the YMCA, the president of the college, even a visiting evangelistall single him out in their prayers and exhortations. A typical picaresque narrative chronicles the exploits of a rogue, an immoral but not criminal character who lives by his wits. Should creationism be taught in public schools? During the opening service, with a crowd of more than four thousand, fire breaks out. 98107. Thus, Schorer concludes, there is no pressure upon Elmer to be forced into a position of new self-awareness. Once Gantry accuses the city government of protecting the brothels and drug dealers, he becomes one of the most powerful men in Zenith. Simulation Theory: How is Religion Part of It? Schorer discusses Lewiss research for the novel, including the clergyman he met in Kansas City. The result is a novel that satirically represents the religious activity of America in evangelistic circles and the attitudes of the 1920s toward it. Kraus used []. He is drawn back to preaching when he falls in love with Sharon Falconer, and he hones his publicity and fundraising skills with her for several years until her death. It tells the story of a hypocritical, corrupt, but very successful preacher named Elmer Gantry. Blessed Virgin, Mother Hera, Mother Frigga, Mother Ishtar, Mother Isis, dread Mother Astarte of the weaving arms, it is thy priestess . They read from the Song of Solomon. Im grateful to them for proving the book. Very few observers, however, thought that he had been as fair and dispassionate as he pretended; one comparatively balanced review of the novel was entitled Red Lewis in a Red Rage, and his former professor William Lyon Phelps declared in an interview that the book must have been written when Lewis was literally foaming at the mouth . Edwin Muir was one of the few critics who found some complexity in Lewiss attitude toward his central character; he thought this complexity was due to the division of intentions which was evident in other Lewis novelsLewis wanted to write both a satire and a novel, to indict his hero and to sympathize with him at the same time. Undoubtedly many of the excesses Lewis describes, especially those connected with revivalism, deserve the treatment they get. Though the bulldog of the football team in college, Elmer shows his cowardice during the fire in Sharon Falconers tabernacle (which is built out over the water): In howling panic, Elmer sprang among them, knocked them aside, struck down a girl who stood in his way, yanked open the door, and got through it the last, the only one, to get through it. He then ran out a little into the surf and dragged in a woman who had already safely touched bottom, and then at least thirty more who had already rescued themselves. Four men and two women crawled about a pillar, barking like dogs, barking the devil out of the tree.. The preacher meets someone in the town, too: a waitress ( Lolita Davidovich) with a crippled young son. Gantry turns out to be the perfect publicity compliment to Sister Sharon, who, unlike him, is a true believer. The preacher tries to warn him off. Elmer is so infatuated with Sharon that he gives up smoking and drinking for her. A popular singer with a voice like French silk pie, Page is most famous for her hit song Tennessee Waltz. When she first appears onscreen, shes got such presence you might think she was the main heroine. The dean sends Gantry and classmate Frank Shallard to pastor a nearby church. They also name Billy Sunday. You could even argue that Gantry is performing a kind of public service, meeting a need with maximum opportunism but without malice. Elmer works diligently and is rewarded at the Methodists Annual Conference by being sent to a bigger church, at Rudd Center. 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. WebHappy Birthday # 75..Barbara Lynn Herzstein, better known as Barbara Hershey, An Actress. Ad Locust is a traveling salesman for the Pequot Farm Implement Company who befriends Elmer on the train to Monarch. She cries out, Oh, dont! The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child. plus-circle Add Review. Simmons is too wispy, and her plummy accent slips through and jars this very American story. Elmer Gantry the novel came out in 1925 and it took 35 years to get it to the screen. You're all doomed to perdition! He seeks out Shallard, who has largely given up his faith but has been persuaded by a Methodist pastor to continue in the ministry and is now at a church in Zenith. 'Until the nineteenth century, actors were classed as Rogues & Vagrants. He has been educated by Roger Williams, Adoniram Judson, Luther, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, George Washington, Lincoln, Robert Ingersoll, William James, and Frasers Golden Bough. Elmers next position is at a church in Monarch. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. Based on the evidence in the novel, there is some truth in this comment. WebHow does the novel Elmer Gantry end? At a revival meeting he does not like to include all the preachers in town. Lewis researched the novel by observing the work of various preachers in Kansas City in his so-called "Sunday School" meetings on Wednesdays. Evangelist Billy Sunday called Lewis "Satan's cohort". As he gains experience, Elmer attempts to broaden his mind. Binch stopped gulping his fried pork chops and held out a flabby, white, holy hand.. How long would a drunkard listen to the counsel of one who had never been inside a saloon? Anywhere. He is so good that it is hard to tell the difference whether he's sincere or lying. 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. Harry Zenz vehemently disagrees with Eddie. AKA: Elmer Gantry, le charlatan. Lundquist, James, Sinclair Lewis, Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1973, pp. | WebDaily newspaper from Chickasha, Oklahoma that includes local, state and national news along with advertising. The college president declares that he is a born preacher, and everyone urges him to become a minister. Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on Elmer Gantry, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006. They also decried the growth within the church of the higher criticism, that sought to understand the Bible based on modern methods of scholarship. 14, Twayne, 1962, pp. He also analyzes the characterization and structure of the novel and Lewiss occasional failure to integrate his story-telling with the social facts he presents. Not now! It is not so much that he does not believe in God. 2023
