Elmer Gantry Summary
Director: Richard Brooks
Genres: Drama
Rating:
Elmer Gantry (Burt_Lancaster), a drunken, dishonest street preacher allegedly patterned on Billy Sunday, wrangles a job with the travelling tent ministry conducted by Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean_Simmons). Thanks to Gantry's enthusiastic hellfire-and-brimstone sermons, Sister Sharon's operation rises to fame and fortune, enough so that Sharon realizes her dream of building her own enormous tabernacle. These ambitions are put in jeopardy when a prostitute (Oscar-winning Shirley_Jones), a former minister's daughter who'd been deflowered by Gantry years earlier, lures Gantry into a compromising situation and has photographs taken. It took several years for any Hollywood studio to take a chance with Sinclair_Lewis' novel, and when it finally did arrive on the screen, producer/director Richard_Brooks was compelled to downplay some of the more "sacrilegious" passages in the original. Also appearing in Elmer Gantry are Arthur_Kennedy as an H.L. Mencken-style atheistic journalist, and Edward_Andrews as George Babbitt, a character borrowed from another Sinclair_Lewis novel. Hal Erickson, Rovi
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