Though this started off paranthetical, I want to devote a whole post to yet another movie I re-watched for the first time in at least 30 years - Burt Lancaster's brilliant tour-de-force as a creepy, fake evangelist in Elmer Gantry. Not only did this movie exceed all my extremely high expectations, but I think I had goosebumps for a solid two hours, not just because of the electrifyingly charismatic (and sexy) main character but because every single performance in this thing was so note-perfect, with NOT ONE miscast actor even in the smallest role. Even the characters with no speaking parts were anything but furniture - they all knew what they were supposed to be doing as part of the scene. The directing was tight and dynamic, the music as fierce and compelling as Lancaster himself, and the script - let's just say it all worked.
It worked for me personally because since the last time I saw it in the '90s, I lived through a horrible church scandal in which the congregation completely fell for a charismatic fake who basically destroyed the foundations of the church in a single year. And he wasn't even sexy like Burt! But it was more than that. Gantry was not just a shallow creep. Lancaster knew how to act using his eyes, his hands and face and voice, and at times he expressed a real tenderness towards Sister Sharon and even the prostitute who tried to frame him. Gantry had levels. He had wanted to be a minister of the Gospel himself, and failed due to his inability to live within the rules. So was it really coincidence that drew him back to the revival tent? Why did he fall so hard for Sister Sharon, literally at first sight? In some part of himself, did he think he could start all over again, and this time get it right? There was more than a trace of conscience in Gantry, and even though he was practiced in ignoring it, we could see it peeping through. How the hell did he manage that?
His internal conflicts, no matter how submerged, were somehow communicated. If this seething moral unease hasn't been settled in Gantry's mind, how can we make up our own minds about him? We can't, and that is what makes his character so compelling. We can't hate him. Sometimes we're rooting for him, as when he slides down the church aisle as if stealing third base. In the first 15 minutes, he makes Jean Simmons laugh in a slightly shocking way - raucous, unihibited, followed by the incredible line, "You smell like a real man." So there is a subtext of sexual attraction between them from the get-go. Wasn't this just a little bit provocative for those times?
Adding an even darker subtext is Sister's later confession to Gantry that her Sharon Falconer persona is a complete invention, and that her real name is "Katy Jones from Shantytown". But was this a real confession, or a strange kind of identification, one fraud acknowledging another? She does clarify that she is different from Gantry in that "I believe. I really believe!" But there are moments in Lancaster's flat-out-brilliant portrayal when we see the shreds and tatters of his former faith, somehow communicated in the way only a genius actor can. The theme of religious spectacle is being held up for scrutiny here, and the audience is left to decide for themselves how sincere any of it is.
There's stuff going on here, so layered, so levelled and striated, that we can't possibly take it all in. I could watch it ten more times and still have goose bumps. Gantry was made in 1960, and received all the accolades it could possibly receive, including an Oscar for Lancaster, who claimed that Gantry was really just a version of himself. That does NOT mean it was an easy role to play - playing yourself can be excruciating, as Marlon Brando was to discover when he publicly gutted himself in Last Tango in Paris. He needed to go into therapy to recover.
True, they don't make them like that any more, and I am not the only one who feels this way. Can I name even one actor who comes close to Simmons or Lancaster, not to mention poor old Monty Clift? Even 30 years ago, real acting genius was disappearing, replaced by the cult of personality. The problem is, you can't smell an actor any more, because no one has the chops. Which is why I have pretty much stopped going to the movies, and why I keep on tuning in to Turner Classics to see pictures which SURELY won't be as superb as I remember. Or not? In this case, Elmer Gantry was like the scene at the very beginning, in which Sister Sharon sees a shooting star - blazing and all too fleeting, but burned into your eyelids through sheer incandescence.
There's stuff going on here, so layered, so levelled and striated, that we can't possibly take it all in. I could watch it ten more times and still have goose bumps. Gantry was made in 1960, and received all the accolades it could possibly receive, including an Oscar for Lancaster, who claimed that Gantry was really just a version of himself. That does NOT mean it was an easy role to play - playing yourself can be excruciating, as Marlon Brando was to discover when he publicly gutted himself in Last Tango in Paris. He needed to go into therapy to recover.
True, they don't make them like that any more, and I am not the only one who feels this way. Can I name even one actor who comes close to Simmons or Lancaster, not to mention poor old Monty Clift? Even 30 years ago, real acting genius was disappearing, replaced by the cult of personality. The problem is, you can't smell an actor any more, because no one has the chops. Which is why I have pretty much stopped going to the movies, and why I keep on tuning in to Turner Classics to see pictures which SURELY won't be as superb as I remember. Or not? In this case, Elmer Gantry was like the scene at the very beginning, in which Sister Sharon sees a shooting star - blazing and all too fleeting, but burned into your eyelids through sheer incandescence.
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