Encyclopedia.com. But he had never encountered vice . He takes care to point out that people return again and again to get converted, which would seem to negate the idea that they are saved in a once in a lifetime experience. WebMake Your Picks. But the arts and the sentiments and the sentimentalitiesthey were for Elmer perpetually associated only with the church. From the exceptionally talented pen of noted author Sinclair Lewis comes this entertaining story of a fast-talking, yarn-spinning vacuum salesman with the natural gift of persuasion. 5 Mar. That night he has doubts, but he is persuaded to speak the following night at the Y.M.C.A. The portrayal of revivals as a necessary service with a precarious balance between helping and hurting both the revivals leaders and attendants is masterful. More mundane examples include the star power of Scientology and Christian rock concerts. Disappointingly though, Pengillys arguments do not rise above the commonplace. Gantry is portrayed as a smooth talking but frustrated salesman, struggling to make a living. Edward A. Martin, "The Mimic as Artist: Sinclair Lewis". Prayings the cheapest first-rate medicine I know, he says. He also raised large amounts of money at his meetings, and like Elmer Gantry, he was one of he first evangelists to spread his message through the new technology of radio. Pengilly sees through him with the spiritual eye of an eagle, and asks, Mr. The boy sees the preacher as a man who can possibly heal his crippled leg. She is also an insane perversion of the sanctity of the elect, for she declares to Elmer, I cant sin! He marries Cleo but gets bored with her and resents her lack of sexual passion. He really shines as a tarnished, immoral salesman who spends Christmas at a bar and leaves with one of the ladies during the Great Depression in the heartland. WebElmer Gantry; Keith Phares, Sharon Falconer; Jennifer Rivera. Despite his doubts, and following Zechlins advice, Shallard decides to remain in the church. Ad Locust is a traveling salesman for the Pequot Farm Implement Company who befriends Elmer on the train to Monarch. The Pilgrim's Regress (1933) Like ordinary mortals, she is often weary. 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. They were intended to feed the American dream, but instead fashioned the nightmareout of books! 4953. Nevertheless, Lewis supplies sufficient background to account for Elmers going into the ministry. Napap would bring about nationwide censorship of novels, plays, paintings, and movies. More information about the Trylons Lancastic! After two more Elmer Gantry may have a rather unsavoury past but the one thing he can do better than anyone is sell himself, pots, pans, anything. Elmer Gantry subtitles. Some found it repugnant and accused Lewis of grossly distorting his subject matter. Using his sales techniques, especially on one of Sister Sharon's underlings, the nave Sister Rachel, Elmer is able infiltrate her entourage. Grebstein, Sheldon Norman, Sinclair Lewis, Twayne United States Authors Series, No. WebVoila! Elmer moves in ever-higher social circles and goes on a three-month speaking tour aimed at the youth of America. After a brief interlude with Mrs. Evans Riddles New Thought movement, and teaching Prosperity classes on his own, Elmer joins the Methodist Church. In fact, the question of whether Elmer is a human being or an ogre in the novel is a relevant one. 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, In Newark, New Jersey, Alvin Shipwreck Kelly sat atop a flagpole for twelve days, and in Chicago, the gangster Al Capone was tightening his grip on bootlegging. Elmer escapes by knocking other people out of the way, but Sharon is burned to death. The bell-boy is scarcely out of the room when Elmer grabs Cleo. Elmer Gantry is a nuanced look at the world of evangelists and revivals. Gantrys pugnacious sermons quickly make him popular in Zenith, but the workload soon overwhelms him and alienates him from Cleo. Higher criticism also showed that some elements in the Bible were also found in other religions and mythologies (the virgin birth, for example). Russia is a European country. 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 character of Sharon Falconer was loosely based on events in the career of the Canadian-born American radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who founded the Pentecostal Christian denomination known as the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in 1927. DIED: 1963, Oxford, England After he had become a celebrity, Lewis usually managed to avoid controversy over his books by being out of the United States when they appeared. McGarry is accused by the fundamentalists of heresy, and he does not seem to accept the traditional dogmas of the Methodist Church: [T]he only dogma he was known to give out positively was the leadership of Jesusas to whose divinity he was indefinite.. Elmer, like other Lewis protagonists, fears marriage. Mrs. Evans Riddle is the proprietor of the Victory Thought Power Headquarters in New York. Two years before adapting Elmer Gantry to the sceen, writer and director Richard Brooks, also adapted and directed The Brothers Karamazov (1958), which featured William Shatner (the original Captain Kirk) in his first movie role, as the saintly brother Alexei. Lewis seems to have had a particular loathing of the conversion experience that is so central to Protestant spirituality. His father was a physician. Traveling in the Southwest, he is beaten and blinded. The famous evangelist Billy Sunday called Lewis Satans cohort.. Since religions are often sold with a spin to attract the most people or a certain group of people, it is important that potential followers examine the reasoning and intentions of religious leaders. Opposition to the movement was vicious; Fosdick was ousted from his New York pulpit, and in the Bible Belt and the deep south, fundamentalism cranked itself up into a powerful machine that found expression through anti-evolution measures volumes of blue laws, and the Ku Klux Klan. Despite their reservations about the dignity of revival-style preaching, many of the pastors agree that it would be best for their congregations to get excited about Christianity again in hopes that this would subsequently bolster attendance. I have told you a mystery. She is the supreme fantasist. Mahlon Potts is the influential minister of the First Methodist Church in Zenith. 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. He is rewarded by being appointed minister of the Wellspring Methodist Church in the large city of Zenith, where the worldly trustee, T. J. Rigg, advises him to bring in the crowds with a rousing sermon denouncing vice. The two make a successful onstage pair, and their chemistry extends to romance. There was a timebetween the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11when Elmer Gantry might have felt outdated. Tough pla takes the ease of use of regular pla and steps it up. Elmer, with the help of T. J. Rigg, turns the tables on her and preserves his career. Still the supporting cast is brilliant as well. Amoral and relentlessly ambitious, Elmer builds a statewide and national reputation as a fiery preacher who never tires of denouncing vice, while at the same time feeling no need to curb his own vices, particularly adultery. The inspiration for Falconer, Aimee Semple McPherson, on the other hand, was thought of as a celebrity, and many felt her intentions were dubious. The tents are filled with people clamoring to see Sister Sharon Falconer. Here, they are the sinister forces of righteousness. Source: Martin Light, Mantrap and Elmer Gantry, in The Quixotic Vision of Sinclair Lewis, Purdue University Press, 1975, pp. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. As the years went on, however, compromises were reached, and these can be seen in the career of Elmer, who begins as a fundamentalist and winds up as the pastor of a large, urban church. An example is the bizarre marriage ceremony which takes place between Elmer and evangelist Sharon Falconer before her grotesque shrine. SYNOPSIS Ill lead you safely through the flames! When Elmer tries to make her escape, she pushes him away. Elmer seems a demonic figure. retrospective of Burt Lancaster films continues at the Trylon Microcinema through November, the month marking the 100th anniversary of Lancaster birth (Nov. 2, 1913), withElmer Gantryon November 11 and 12. Shallard attempts to stand against Gantrys attempts to destroy him, but eventually he resigns from his pulpit. In fact, the film could be seen as prescient, as both religious revivalism, and celebrity-scandal driven journalism (another of its subjects), have arguably become more prevalent since it was made. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. 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. Pengilly is an old Methodist pastor who is something of a saintly figure. Elmer Gantry is a film that exposes hypocrisy and greed among religious leaders who seek to exploit gullible citizens looking for something in which to believe. There is a definite give and take between Gantry and Falconer and the congregants in Elmer Gantry. International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, "Elmer Gantry, a Flawed Preacher for the Ages", "The Censorship Crusade: A Story For Banned Books Week | Americans United", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elmer_Gantry&oldid=1142298283, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, A 1970 Broadway musical adaptation, titled. Im a very ignorant young woman with a lot of misdirected energy and some tiny idealism, she explains to Elmer. But while Elmers career ascends, that of the honest Frank Shallard, who goes to the seminary with Elmer, descends to the point where Frank is beaten up by members of the Ku Klux Klan for preaching what he believes to be the truth. The last date is today's Sharon is supposed to be a firebrand, based on evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, part Houdini, part Teddy Roosevelt, who preached a dramatic God. 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. Rewrite it from Jims point of view. 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. Lewiss famed businessman character, George Babbitt, and pastors in the community discuss the merits of holding a revival in Zenith. He befriends Frank Shallard. Wallace Umstead is a student Mizpah Theological Seminary who becomes the secretary of the Zenith Y.M.C.A. 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. He advises Elmer not to denounce vice directly, by naming names and giving addresses of illegal drinking places, because the owners of such buildingswho of course have no knowledge of any illegal activitiesare often leading church contributors and attacking them would jeopardize their support for the church. Later Frank is thrown from the church and he ventures forth as a worker in a charity organization. , Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, McGraw Hill, 1961, pp. When he finally got the green light, it was United Artists that agreed to distribute the film. Salesman Elmer Gantry, salesman teams up with evangelist Sister Sharon Falconer to sell religion to 1920s America. Some characters from Lewis even read Sinclair Lewis himself; the Reverend Philip McGarry asks his friend Frank Shallard to forget that you have to make a new world, bettern the Creators, right away tonightyou and Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis (Lord, how that book of Lewis, Main Street, did bore me ).. Once Gantry accuses the city government of protecting the brothels and drug dealers, he becomes one of the most powerful men in Zenith. 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 Undoubtedly many of the excesses Lewis describes, especially those connected with revivalism, deserve the treatment they get. 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.. After exposing the professors secret, Gantry receives an anonymous gift of thirty dimes, which he uses to buy photographs of strippers. 2019Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. REL 360: Popular Culture/Public Humanities, Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, Humans and Nazis: Reevaluating the Conversation of. It is the Morning and the Evening Star. Elmer Gantry, like Arrowsmith, is an account of career development. Mrs. Gantry is Elmers mother. Lewiss personal life was troubled, and he and his second wife were divorced in 1942. Sign In He joins the staff of a metaphysical cult but is fired when he is caught stealing from the collection plate. After exposing the professors secret, The wife is full of complaints about the life she has had to lead, married to a preacher, criticized by the church women if they thought her clothes werent suitable, sick of having to pretend to be so good when we were just common folks all the time! Her tirade at her husband, who only wants to be allowed to go to sleep, includes the following passage: Oh, dear. Ed. He goes to live with his niece and dies within two years. This script is a transcript that was painstakingly transcribed using the screenplay and/or viewings of Elmer Gantry. He becomes the symbiotic antithesis to Sister Sharon: while he tells of heading toward the depths of hell for his many sins, she tells of being saved from that fate if repentance is forthcoming. Fire is mentioned throughout the film, and cinematographer John Alton sets the mood by casting dark red and brown shadows. Garrison Gantry, too. 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 . WebElmer Gantry. Of the other characters, Frank Shallard and Dr. Philip McGarry are examples of the liberal tendency in the church. 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. Thats Elmer Gantry. Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger in 1914, and they had one son, Wells, in 1917. eNotes.com, Inc. Burt Lancaster's Oscar Winning performance in the title role was well-worth the accolades. I kept asking him about steelwhat its made of, what its used foruntil one day he said in exasperation, I dont care about steel. Web"Success is not the key to happiness. On publication in 1927, Elmer Gantry created a public furor. Nothing reveals Lewiss isolation from an overview of life more clearly than the way he dismisses religion. On publication, Elmer Gantry had a sensational reception. The church filled him with awe, frightened him, became the center of all his emotions. During the opening service, with a crowd of more than four thousand, fire breaks out. We are all bored by tired old men explaining the Bible through their noses! Cleo Benham is the high-minded daughter of Nathaniel Benham. It applied the methods of historical and literary analysis in order to determine the authorship, date and place of composition of the books of the Bible. And even if you saw the big sign outside, you probably wouldn't know that this is specifically an Ethiopian restaurant, and a very good one. Afterward, he must resign himself to helplessness for the rest of his life. WebOn publication, Elmer Gantry had a sensational reception. Gantrys conversion makes him the talk of the campus, and Jim soon moves out. 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. Retrieved February 23, 2023 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/elmer-gantry. Movies Podcasts Reviews Podcasts Reviews Its a movie about driving passions so hot and strongfor a sale, for salvationthey burn a person up. Lulu Bains is the daughter of Barney Bains. The footballer wins by flattering Elmer, insulting Elmers courage, and challenging Elmer to a fight over The Lord. There they meet their host, Deacon Bains, and his daughter Lulu, an ingenue whom Gantry continually tries to seduce. But he did not achieve the heights of success he had enjoyed during the 1920s. 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). Reverend Andrew Pengilly is the old pastor of the Catawba Methodist Church. Falconer gives of herself throughout the film to help her congregants, often going outside her comfort zone to preach to angry crowds and secure the donations she sees as a necessary evil for the continuance of her sermons. 12631. He also thinks that Baptist leaders are word-splitting, text-twisting, applause-hungry, job-hunting, medieval-minded second-raters . Horace Carp hates the Baptists and wants to switch to the more upscale Episcopalians as soon as possible because this will give him a better social position in which he will be able to marry a nice rich girl. Brother Karkis only wants his divinity degree so he can get a better paying job. I am not going to tell you that youre sinners, for which of us is not a sinner? Ashley Daugherty is a senior majoring in Anthropology and Spanish. Elmer Gantry is a picaresque novel. This film is not only good; it misses being great by a narrow margin. Lewis attacked it as no more than mass hysteria. Judson Roberts, the enthusiastic, apparently confident evangelist who converts Elmer, admits to himself that his preaching is dishonest. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. For all that, you also fear for a world in which the influence of modern-day Gantries shows no sign of diminishing. She sinks into Elmers arms. Here she kneels. He is immediately taken with Sister Sharon Falconer, a lay preacher whose hellfire-and-damnation revivalism has attracted quite a following. In a sense it is more centrally concerned because the pull between the old American and the new American was so apparent in the religious controversies of the time. Sharon believes she is above sin and that she can do anything she wants to because she is Gods messenger. Encyclopedia.com. (February 23, 2023). "Elmer Gantry", directed by Richard Brooks, is one of his best. To increase his vocabulary he begins a word list: incinerate, Merovingian, Golgotha, Leigh Hunt, defeasance, chansonromantic-sounding words. Barney Bains is a deacon at the Baptist church in Schoenheim and the father of Lulu. Lewis died of heart disease in Rome, Italy, in 1951. After several years as a travelling salesman of farm equipment, he becomes manager for Sharon Falconer, an itinerant evangelist. However, Roberts doubts the truth of the doctrines he preaches so convincingly. I just spend two days at my best friends' home for his father's funerals, and during the obligatory moments of life contemplation, we were wondering what was awaiting us all. The story of a womanizing con man and an evangelist selling religion all across America was an They had a son, Michael, in 1930, the same year that Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. 4748; originally published in the Bookman, March 1927. 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. In 1905, after two years study, he is ordained. PG. 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. Early in his preaching career he jilts a country girl who loves him and whom he has seduced. He survived for a while by interpreting some of the Biblical stories as symbols that revealed the glory of God and the leadership of Christ. He has an affair with his secretary, who then tries to blackmail him, and only escapes ruin because he has a clever lawyer. But the honest man who dares to live according to his convictions, and to speak about them in public, has no place in a superstitious society; when he gives an antifundamentalist lecture, Frank is beaten and blinded. For example, the division between Northern and Southern Baptists is explained in this way: [B]efore the Civil War the Northern Baptists proved by the Bible, unanswerably, that slavery was wrong; and the Southern Baptists proved by the Bible, irrefutably, that slavery was the will of God. Later in the novel, Frank Shallard realizes how threatened conservative clergymen are by scientific knowledge and how inadequate they are to preside over educational institutions. Dinner at the Governors Ball with Eddie Fisher. After his wedding to Cleo, he gasps to himself, Oh, good God, Ive gone and tied myself up, and I never can have any fun again! His treatment of her on the wedding night is reminiscent of Eddie Schwirtzs treatment of Una Golden. Within the Cite this article tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. Its hero makes his way, with the help of native cunning and oratorical ability, through almost the whole domain of religion in the United States. Lancaster is absolutely mesmerizing as "Elmer Gantry." But Elmer does have a program in Napap, which he hopes will make him something of a moral dictator. 3945; originally published in New York Herald Tribune Books, March 13, 1927. The second is the date of He feels little desire to practice what he preaches. While working for the Daily Courier in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1908, he wrote an editorial about fraudulent evangelists, which suggests that the seeds of Elmer Gantry were already being sown. Published in 1922 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. 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, Diamond stretches out his hand toward a young woman who places in The following was written for REL 360: Popular Culture/Public Humanities. Addeddate 2017-01-24 22:02:04 Identifier in.ernet.dli.2015.184871 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t87h71c67 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11.0 Ppi 600 Scanner Internet Archive Python library 1.2.0.dev4. Gantry, why dont you believe in God?. He long ago lost his faith in the literal truth of the Bible and has become an atheist. On the trip to his new church, he gets drunk and carouses with women; he is discovered and is dismissed from the seminary. 12630. He urges Elmer to become a minister. It was the best-selling work of fiction in America for the year 1927, according to Publishers Weekly.[6]. 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. Anywhere. 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. Equity is one part of a broader vision for the Hiawatha network of schools. But what did he know of the forces which cause wars, personal or class or national; what of drugs, passion, criminal desire; of capitalism, banking, labor, wages, taxes; international struggles for trade, munition trusts, ambitious soldiers?
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