best movie i've ever seen.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Elmer Gantry (Lancaster) is two different people. There's the person he is when it comes to religion and then he is a completely different, very flawed, human being when it comes to everything else. You name it and he's done it. To quote the film, "and how do I know there's a merciful God? Because I've seen the devil plenty of times!" (The close up on that shot is amazing)There's a reason Burt Lancaster won an Oscar for his performance as Gantry. It's one of the finest I've ever seen by any actor ever. He convincingly switches between passionate preacher and sinner. There's never any doubt that he believes what he preaches, though his preaching itself is sometimes a total lie.Is he duping the people when he does that? Yes. But is he causing any harm? His faith is not in question, he gives other people faith, is any of that a bad thing? Is it bad simply because he, at times, is a bad person? Is duping them necessarily a bad thing? It's a triumph of the film the way that it portrays a character with such seemingly conflicting morals, and portray him in a way that seems very realistic.What is the message of the movie? His and Sharon Falconer's revivalism starts out as simply giving people morals to abide by and faith in love and God. "A bountiful God, a generous God." That is certainly never a bad thing. However it takes a turn towards vigilante when Gantry leads a religious mob to raid liquor stores and brothels. It takes an even further, perhaps harmless, turn at the end with faith healing. Harmless until Falconer attempts to convince her churchgoers to not flee the burning church, because God will save them.Is the message of the film that religion is good until taken too far? Did God burn the church down because he disapproved of faith healing? Where is the line between religion being helpful and religion actually causing harm? It is the sign of a great movie when at the end I find myself asking questions like that. It is a rare quality.

Richard Brooks directed Burt Lancaster in this vibrant and cynical story of Elmer Gantry, a glib, hard-living traveling salesman who latches onto a true-believing, fire & brimstone preaching woman named "Sister" Sharon Falconer(Jean Simmons), who has a traveling revivalist church that Gantry, who has a rudimentary knowledge of the bible, and a way with the people, quickly makes his own(with Sharon's approval of course) At first, things go well, but before too long Gantry's past catches up with him when a former love of dubious character(played well by Shirley Jones) pays him a visit, and he is caught in the act of giving money, which threatens the ministry and sets events spiraling out-of-control to the fiery climax.Powerful, supremely well-acted film shows the dark side of a charismatic personality, and those gullible enough to follow them. Not really an attack on religion, since the same rule could be applied to politics, both then and now...

I came into this expecting it to be an exposé of the tent revival movement, and it is that, but I was left with many questions that I have had about the revival phenomenon since I was a young man. More out of curiosity than anything else I attended many such revivals in Oklahoma in the late 1950s. I imagine that there has not been a better time and place to experience these events in their most authentic form, and I came away from them in the same frame of mind that I came away from this movie, wondering just how much of a con job they are. And wondering what the people involved really believe. Burt Lancaster gives a remarkable performance as Gantry in this adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel. At the beginning of the movie Gantry is a salesman who is not selling much. Then he sees an opportunity to attach himself to the itinerant evangelist Sister Sharon Falconer. He rises in the ranks due to his zealous sermonizing. By the end of the movie he has changed, even declining the advances of an old flame who commented that he had once "rammed the fear of God into me." I was left to speculate about whether Gantry had truly reformed or whether he had bought into his own malarkey. Just when it seemed that he had become a man of god, he closes with the enigmatic quote from the Bible:When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.Was he saying that he recognized his past behavior as fraudulent, or was he saying that he could now see a way to a more honest ministry?I found Jean Simmons to be miss-cast. She did not project the charisma and strength that I think would be necessary in her position. In the one healing scene she seemed particularly weak. If you want to see some real industrial strength healing in action, catch Oral Roberts in his prime on YouTube.Arthur Kennedy plays news reporter Jim Lefferts. He is probably a stand-in for Sinclair Lewis, being highly skeptical of the whole business. The exchanges between Gantry and Lefferts are at the core of the story. Gantry is such a slippery character that even the cynical Lefferts can't get beyond puzzling over just what sort of man he is.The revival performances I witnesses had it down pat in terms of how to put on a show. There was some warm-up music, maybe something like "Softly and Tenderly, Jesus Is Calling." After a few of the old time hymns the evangelist would come on, starting out slowly and building to a climax, then more aggressive music presented in a rock and roll style. In fact in attending rock concerts later in life I saw a great similarity in the arc of the presentations--the idea is to whip the audience into a frenzy as things go along. Of course in the revival setting, after the audience had been primed they were asked to come forward for conversion, healing, the laying on of hands, or whatever. I have to say that, even as an atheist, it was hard not to be taken in by the spirit of the thing, and I did not get that emotional experience from this movie.

Richard Brooks's adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's "Elmer Gantry" looks at the revivalist movement of the 1920s, but it could just as easily be about modern-day evangelical Christianity. Burt Lancaster plays the title character, a shyster clergyman exploiting the beliefs of the faithful in middle America. With his fiery speeches, Elmer comes across as a man of the people, but he's only after their money. Jean Simmons co-stars as an evangelist based on Aimee Semple McPherson. She actually believes in what she's doing, but the self-aggrandizing Elmer simply rides her coattails. And then there's Shirley Jones as a prostitute who has her own story about Elmer.It's important to understand that the early 20th century had seen the rise of revivalist Christianity in response to the influx of Catholics from Europe. These predecessors of evangelicalism were the ones who pushed for the establishment of prohibition (which had disastrous results). The Scopes Trial set them back due to the perception that they were a bunch of ignorant yokels*, but they returned in the 1970s in response to everything that happened in the '60s. Elmer Gantry is depicted as a hypocritical preacher, but he could easily be any politician. There are few things as creepy as exploiting people's beliefs just to get them to support you.*The "Elmer Gantry" character Jim Lefferts is based on H.L. Mencken, who notably depicted the people in Dayton, Tennessee, as backwards hicks, which they basically were.