Elmer Gantry (1960)

(Criterion Streaming, March 2020) If you’re the kind of person to seek optimism in the most desperate situations, you can take a look south of the border in these desperate times and remind yourself that America isn’t solely composed of idiots—and more pointedly, there have always been sane voices in the wilderness highlighting the mistakes of the nation (past, ongoing and inevitable). Go back to 1960, for instance, and we already have Elmer Gantry as a mature, full-throated warning about the similarities between conmen and preachers. Burt Lancaster, never afraid to use his good looks in the service of questioning traditional masculinity, plays the titular Elmer, a fast-talking huckster who turns his talents to revivalist religion in order to woo a fetching young woman (Jean Simmons). Loosely adapted by writer-director Richard Brooks from a muckraking novel by Sinclair Lewis (Brooks won an Academy Award for the screenplay), Elmer Gantry isn’t content with merely making a link between confidence games and small-tent religious revivals—it’s a film that digs and digs into the characters, their unsavoury pasts, impure intentions, zealotry and mob vengeance to deliver a sobering statement on being taken by fast words and empty promises. Lancaster is terrific as a salesman turned fire-and-brimstone preacher, easily capturing audiences on both sides of the screen. (He also won an Oscar for it.) Elmer Gantry greatly benefits from his presence, and he helps the film overcome its excessive length. It probably doesn’t help that while Elmer Gantry confronts issues important to circa-1960 America, much of what it has to say is now common wisdom… or is it?