The film and Sinclair Lewis’s novel published in 1927 fortunately have only the name in common. Lewis’s novel was a one note attack on hypocrisy in Protestant Christianity. The movie is more complex. In the movie Gantry, stunningly portrayed by Burt Lancaster, is a fast talking door to door salesman who finds fulfillment as the right hand man of Sister Sharon Falconer, a tent evangelist, played by Jean Simmons. Both Gantry and Falconer are flawed people, especially Gantry who loves women and booze, but both are also true believers. The film explores this and how religious devotion can become tainted by the chase after worldly riches. Arthur Kennedy as Jim Leffets, skeptical journalist, had the role of his career in this film. Lancaster invests Gantry with a depth that a lesser actor would have completely failed at portraying. A flawed masterpiece.
Bonus:
It is not an accident that more and more people are refusing the effluent that comes out of Hollywood and watching old movies and shows. There is a reason that movie theatres are going bankrupt and it is not covid as the media likes to assert. It is that virtually everything coming out of Hollywood is complete propaganda. Disney is particularly infected by DEI virus. Why would I want to spend $30 for a lecture? I want to be entertained, not indoctrinated. Movies like Elmer Gantry can teach a lesson without beating you over the head with a hammer like Hollywood does now.
Arthur Kennedy (Pilate) has an interesting debate with Anthony Quinn (Barabbas) in Barabbas (1961):
I knew I recognized Jean Simmons. In 1991, she made a late-career appearance in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Drumhead” as a retired Starfleet Admiral Norah Satie and hardened legal investigator who conducts a witch hunt.
BTW, films like the subject of this post are rarely made nowadays. 🙁