Richard Brooks’s version of Sinclair Lewis’s novel gives Burt Lancaster the part of his life, a drinking, grinning salesman who discovers religion sells. The film around him is handsome and too long, and says everything twice, but the grin carries it.
Sinclair Lewis published Elmer Gantry in 1927 and it made a great many people angry. Richard Brooks, writing and directing, keeps the anger and much of the plot, and adds a love story Lewis would have sneered at. Elmer is a salesman who cannot hold a job, a drunk who can hold a room, and a man who knows every Bible verse that closes a sale. He walks into Sister Sharon Falconer’s tent and sees a woman he wants and a business he understands; the film is about those turning out to be the same thing. It runs 146 minutes, about twenty more than it needs.
Lancaster is the reason to watch. He plays Gantry with his whole body, arms out, teeth bared, leaning into the congregation as if he means to climb over the rail. The first sermon he gives, uninvited, from the floor of Sharon’s tent, is the film’s best scene. We laughed at him, because Brooks lets us see the wheels turning, and then we noticed we had leaned forward. That is the trick: he is a fraud, he is having a wonderful time, and the pleasure is catching. Once or twice, in a hotel corridor, he lets us see there is nothing behind the grin but more grin.
John Alton shoots the tent in colour, lantern light on faces and black canvas behind them, so the converts look lit from within and the sawdust aisle looks like a stage. He is better known for black and white, and he lets the dark do most of the work. Dorothy Jeakins puts Sharon in white from throat to hem and Gantry in loud checks and a straw hat, so that on the platform he looks like a bookmaker who has wandered into a christening. André Previn’s score is mostly brass and hymn tunes played slightly too fast. Marjorie Fowler cuts the sermons against the crowd, a farmer, a widow, a boy, and her rhythm as much as Lancaster’s makes the conversions feel like a sale being closed.
Jean Simmons is asked to do something harder: to play someone who might believe it. Her Sharon is not a fraud, or not a simple one, and Simmons keeps the question open. In one scene she tells Gantry, quietly, what she was before she was Sister Sharon, and it moved us more than we expected from a film this loud; Simmons plays it as a woman testing whether she can still say the words out loud. Arthur Kennedy’s Lefferts is a reporter who likes Gantry too much to destroy him and too little to leave him alone. Dean Jagger’s Morgan counts the collection and asks no questions. Edward Andrews, as George F. Babbitt, arrives with a cigar and a committee to explain what a revival is worth to Zenith’s shopkeepers. Shirley Jones turns up later as Lulu Bains, a woman with a claim on Gantry’s past, and is harder and better than anything else in that stretch.
The trouble is Brooks the screenwriter. Lefferts is given speeches that tell us what we have just watched, and the film cannot let a scene of hypocrisy pass without a character pointing at it. The converts are played for comedy more often than is kind: a woman throwing down her crutches, a drunk weeping into a hymn book. We laughed, then felt we had laughed at the wrong people; these are the marks, and the film wants our sympathy for them in the next scene. The second half turns to melodrama and the satire thins as the plot thickens.
Most critics rate it higher than we do, mostly for Lancaster. Brooks made Blackboard Jungle five years earlier and has the same gift here for a big room and a crowd turning, and the same habit of underlining. It is not as sharp as its source, and it knows less than Lewis did about how belief and money keep each other company.
Watch it for the tent scenes and forgive it the rest. When Lancaster gets up to preach, you will find yourself checking whether your wallet is still where you left it.
