He returns to it in the context of Sharons revival meetings. . Reverend Andrew Pengilly is the old pastor of the Catawba Methodist Church. Schorer also says that, while researching the book, Lewis attended two or three church services every Sunday while in Kansas City, and that: "He took advantage of every possible tangential experience in the religious community." 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. 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. The congregation slowly begins to join back in and Gantry begins to solo with the WebI Am Legend Ending Explained: The Ending We Got (And The One We Didn't) 27 November 2022 Slash Film The Magnificent Seven Wasn't Working Until It Added That Unforgettable Score 19 November 2022 Slash Film IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. publication in traditional print. Then from 1918 to 1920 he is in Sparta, where the population is 129,000. Gene Warren and Tim Baar, The Time Machine. The pious but stupid Eddie complains that [E]verything we Baptists stand for is threatened by those darn so-called liberals . He is referring to the practice of open communion, which is favored by liberals, as opposed to the closed communion of the fundamentalists, according to which only Baptists are allowed to participate in the rite. Elmer's presence is against the wishes of Sister Sharon's manager, William Morgan, who sees through Elmer's smooth-talking veneer, although he can't argue with the bottom line that Elmer brings to the meetings. 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. Stidger introduced Lewis to many other clergymen, among them the Reverend Leon Milton Birkhead, a Unitarian and an agnostic. When she overhears Gantry seducing their pianist, she fires them, but Gantry convinces her to reconsider. The result would be the fascist state against which Babbitt, in anticipation of 1984, warns. After two more A satire can be aimed at an individual or a group. WebWhat is meant by gantry girders? Undoubtedly many of the excesses Lewis describes, especially those connected with revivalism, deserve the treatment they get. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. All those who profess to be religious in the novel are shown as hypocrites or morons; the best we can expect, apparently, is a nominal profession of belief for the sake of convenience: the good shepherd is the one who sees that his lambs are fed with material food, not stale spiritual claptrap. 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. He was saturated with itthe sermons, hymns, Bible stories, funerals, weddings, Sunday schools. Her main supporter is worldly William Morgan (Dean Jagger) who believes in Falconer, and sees Gantry and Lefferts for the opportunistic impediments they are. 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. He preaches at the service that gets Elmer converted. He is an opportunist, a rogue, a charlatan. Drama. Duke mentioned that he would love to play Puck, []. After two years as a salesman, Elmer meets Eddie Fislinger at his church in Kansas, and he decides he wants to be a preacher again. A more elaborate kind of fantasy arises out of Lewiss belief that formal religion is based on the self-interest of its leaders. Sin, Sin. Is he successful? Webdc.title: Elmer Gantry. If all of them are there, he says. "Elmer Gantry Her voice was warm, a little husky, desperately alive. Still the supporting cast is brilliant as well. 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. Jim Lefferts is Elmers roommate and his only friend at Terwillinger College. ." 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. 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. She cries out, Oh, dont! This was not the last of McPhersons affairs; one of her lovers described the homemade altar in her apartment, in front of which they would make lovewhich is strikingly similar to the scene in Chapter 12 of Elmer Gantry, in which Elmer and Sharon also make love before an altar in her house in Virginia. 12631. He says both. Most distressing of all, says Frank, the sermons of the preachers are agonizingly dull. So Frank leaves the church temporarily to enter the army where he learns to be common with common men; he schools himself further with Ethan Frome, Pre Goriot, Tono-Bungay, and Renans Jesus. For several sessions of congress he had backed a bill for a federal censorship of all fiction, plays, and moving pictures, with a penitentiary sentence for any author mentioning adultery even by implication, ridiculing prohibition, or making light of any Christian sect or minister. WebThere is a bit of a rough edit in the middle, because the scene is actually over 8 minutes long, and I needed to get it down to under 5 minutes. Frank finds some shame in being a preacher and longs to prove that he is nevertheless a real man. Not only had he been swathed in theology, but all his experience had been in books instead of the speech of toiling men. Elmer 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. Although Elmer is clearly a self-centered individual from the beginning, Lewis presents him, up to and including his conversion, as being swept along by sociological and psychological forces over which he has no control. But he is caught stealing from the collection and is fired. The title character of Elmer Gantry starts He is immediately taken with Sister Sharon Falconer, a lay preacher whose hellfire-and-damnation revivalism has attracted quite a following. Sharon is supposed to be a firebrand, based on evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, part Houdini, part Teddy Roosevelt, who preached a dramatic God. He marries Cleo but gets bored with her and resents her lack of sexual passion. Elmer meets up again with Lulu, now married to Floyd Naylor, and they resume their flirtation. The Trylon features 50 deluxe rocker seats, a 20-foot screen, and a pair of Century Model SA 35mm projectors. The angriest of Lewiss novels, Elmer Gantry seems to arise from impulses that invert the quixotic. Here, they are the sinister forces of righteousness. Nevertheless, Lewis supplies sufficient background to account for Elmers going into the ministry. Pengilly is an old Methodist pastor who is something of a saintly figure. The sociological factor that works against Elmer is the entire small-town Protestant environment in which he was raised. 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. Source: Martin Light, Mantrap and Elmer Gantry, in The Quixotic Vision of Sinclair Lewis, Purdue University Press, 1975, pp. 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. Pretending to be outraged, Elmer resigns his position. The Lancastic! Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. In The Master, Joaquin Phoenix plays an alcoholic failure who falls in thrall to cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Elmer is subjected to a kind of collective emotional manipulation. For Sheldon Norman Grebstein, writing in 1962, the novel has snap, flavor, a strong narrative line, a good deal of authenticity But it is distorted, even too much for satire; it lacks conflict and contrast. In a generally favorable assessment, James Lundquist, in Sinclair Lewis, brings attention to Lewiss mastery of irony, but he also comments on a weakness in the plot, arguing that the final crisis Elmer faces is unconvincing in its details. Shallard attempts to stand against Gantrys attempts to destroy him, but eventually he resigns from his pulpit. Elmer Gantry may have a rather unsavoury past but the one thing he can do better than anyone is sell himself, pots, pans, anything. Simulation Theory: How is Religion Part of It? As Elmer turns an attractive and charming preacher with a large audience . Traditionalists, therefore, rejected the new approach of liberal theology. Bess Needham marries Frank Shallard and bears him three children. She was reported missing after swimming off Venice Beach, California, turning up five weeks later in Mexico, claiming she had been kidnapped. Elmer forces him to resign by questioning his religious beliefs, after which Shallard gets a job with the Charity Organization Society. When Deacon Bains discovers Gantrys affair with Lulu and forces him to propose, Gantry tricks another man into an entanglement with Lulu and is released from the engagement. "Elmer Gantry" can be considered the quintessential exploration into the omnipresent duality existing between a person's religious faith and simultaneous character defects. Now dont you go explaining! (540) 7.7 2 h 26 min 1960 13+. Some day he would be a bishop, yes, but even that was nothing compared with the fact that he had won a victory over his lower nature. He kneels in prayer, but in that instant he sees Cleo and at once thinks of seducing her. The famous evangelist Billy Sunday called Lewis Satans cohort.. Both time and cost are saved by the high efficiency. Gantry is portrayed as a smooth talking but frustrated salesman, struggling to make a living. She is looking to work in Applied Business Anthropology. Besides the rise of world fundamentalism and revelations of sexual abuse by big-name evangelists and Catholic priests, Elmer Gantry calls up popular figures such as Sarah Palin. At a revival meeting he does not like to include all the preachers in town. He does not really hate sin, because it is useful to him: the more vice he can discover and denounce, the more his reputation as a man of God grows. Jones is too frothy, but when she appears halfway through, she adds bubbles to a long movie that was starting to go flat. A typical picaresque narrative chronicles the exploits of a rogue, an immoral but not criminal character who lives by his wits. Based on the muckraker Sinclair Lewis' novel, and superbly translated to the screen by Richard Brooks (In Cold Blood , The Professionals, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), this story of huckster-ism by religion is a masterpiece. As the good Sister employs him as a Bible-spouting person to expand the God Will and along the way he gets considerable success . During this period, traditional religious believers were deeply disturbed by the encroachments made on faith by science and secularism. In Lincoln, he persuades her to let him speak at the meeting about how he, a businessman, was converted. 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. Did he approve earthly monarchies or rebel against them? Dont be afraid! WebElmer Gantry; Keith Phares, Sharon Falconer; Jennifer Rivera. The fundamentalists also have to deal with outright skeptics, like Jim Lefferts, and covert atheists like Dr. Zechlin. Judson Roberts is an evangelist who is the state secretary of the Y.M.C.A. James Benedict Moore, "The Sources of Elmer Gantry". Continuity mistake: At the end, there is a scene in a burning church. How would you describe his demeanor? Elmer himself had owned two volumes of Conan Doyle, one of E. P. Roe, and a priceless copy of Only a Boy. His literary inspirations were McGuffeys Readers, Nick Carter, Bible stories, and such stock characters as Little Lame Tom who shamed the wicked rich man that owned the handsome team of grays and the pot hat and led him to Jesus. 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. Bishop Toomis possesses a complete Dickens, a complete Walter Scott, Tennyson, Macaulay, Ruskin, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Winston Churchill, Elizabeth of the German Garden, and books on travel and nature study: How to Study the Birds, My Summer in the Rockies, and Pansies for Thoughts. It is not so much that he does not believe in God. Originally a London soul band called Five Proud Walkers, they threw their lot in with He wont harm you! Sin, sin, sin! Robert J. Higgs. Of course, turmoil closes in on them as their inherent instincts of love overpower their adherence to the Christian principles they attempt to profess. Then his past comes back to haunt him in the form of Lulu Bains (Shirley Jones) who is now a prostitute. Note: When citing an online source, it is important to include all necessary dates. 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. However as the pressure builds to tear him down, can Gantry prevent his past from returning to haunt him? It tells the story of a hypocritical, corrupt, but very successful preacher named Elmer Gantry. Published in 1922 Gantry considers Shallards company an obstacle to his plans with Lulu, so he engineers Shallards resignation with accusations of apostasy. He welcomes Elmer into the Methodist church. But Frank rages on at the inconsistencies in doctrine, the contradictions in the Bible, the evil men who are ministers, and the fools and dullards who work about him in Zenith: Gantry, Bishop Toomis, Chester Brown, Hickenlooper, and PottsPotts especially, who gets his idea of human motives out of George Eliot and Margaret Deland, and his ideas of economics out of editorials in the Advocate, and his idea as to what he really is accomplishing out of the flattery of his Ladies Aid! Frank adds that he doesnt find Jesus an especially admirable characterJesus was more vain and furious than a leader should be. After Sharon dismisses him in favor of Elmer, Cecil tries to conduct a rescue mission in Buffalo. Web1. Sit down and take in everything this film is offering, you won't be disappointed. Elmer attends Mizpah Theological Seminary, a Baptist institution in Babylon, in the Midwest. 2 hr 26 min. WebElmer turns to Rigg for help, who hires a detective to dig up incriminating evidence against Hettie and her husband. So scandalous was Lewiss portrayal of religion that the novel was banned in several cities and denounced from pulpits across the nation. But Page plays the small role of choir leader Sister Rachel. The attendants give her their money, she leaves after a short period of time, and then the attendants are no better off and short on money. Lancaster is absolutely mesmerizing as "Elmer Gantry." The Reverend McGarry tells Frank simply to accept the church with all its imperfectionswith its Gantrysand turn to giving hope and comfort to the piteous human beings who come to the church for help. Elmer Gantry was raised by his mother, a staunch Baptist, in the small town of Paris, Kansas. Eddie spreads the word that Elmer, who has never shown any zeal for religion, has been converted. 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. His dissatisfaction with his life, as well as his drinking, lying, and philandering give the audience a portrait of an unsavory man. Will his charade collapse when an ex-lover shows up to settle a score? Harry Zenz does not believe a word of what he is taught at the seminary. During his career, Gantry contributes to the downfall, physical injury, and even death of key people around him, including a sincere minister, Frank Shallard, who is plagued by doubt. But he did not achieve the heights of success he had enjoyed during the 1920s. The result is as discouraging, as horrifying, as it would have been if Huck had been converted by Miss Watsons Bible stories. Kayfabe, or, Why a Scholar of Religion Might Be Interested in Pro Wrestling. Jim is the college freethinker and the only person who has any influence on Elmer. She had bought the plantation just two years before. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Id sell anything.. 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. It is success that proves faith in this religion, not the other way round. One device after another is employed to introduce him to new denominations and round out the picture.

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