Bless him! Damn him! It's Elmer Gantry

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.

When a good movie turns bad: how many times is this going to happen?

Having come out the other side of The Roosevelts and Taxi  Driver, I'm finding most of my movie nostalgia trips are disappointing. I finally got around to watching Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence (triggered by my re-post of the poetic tribute to my good pal Marty). I remember seeing it in the mid-90s, back when I used to go to a movie a week, often commuting into Vancouver if I thought it was worthwhile. And I do rememver loving it, or at least finding it intriguing. It's based on an Edith Wharton novel which is, in essence, about social snobbery and intrigue in 1870s New York. Daniel Day Lewis was in his heyday then, and apparently could do no wrong, for he played a frustrated lover who could not connect sexually with the free-spirited Michelle Pfeiffer because he was already married to an appropriately dull blueblood (Winona Ryder).

It's a period piece, of course, but it's all very  '90s, and even though it was meant to represent deepest antiquity, it just felt dated. For one thing, Day Lewis was probably way more boring than Winona, who actually came across as the most subtle, best-realized character. Michelle Pfeiffer was so unappealing, not just physically unattractive but abrasive and particularly un-charming and un-seductive, that the whole thing just didn't come off, any more than her tight Victorian corset and elbow-length gloves were going to come off.

I hate to have to say it, but I'll say it - Day Lewis came across as so passive and repressed that he bored me to tears. You can overdo the repressed thing to the point of coma. He even seemed effeminate to  me, a word we aren't supposed to use any more - but what I mean is, there was absolutely zero sexual spark between the  two of them. Nothing. Pfeiffer seemed cold and superficial, her flirting seemed like an actual effort (I got so sick of her thrusting her hand out at men so they were forced to kiss it), and if Day Lewis would JUST get that moony-calf look off his face. . . Was there any sexual tension there at all? Did there need to be? 

Well, yes. It's called acting. In some cases, the spark is already there and only needs to be revealed: Bogart and Bacall are a notable example, as are Bette Davis and Gary Merrill in All About Eve. You got the feeling they couldn't wait to hear "CUT!" so they could jump into bed together. But these are actors, folks. Their stock in trade is pretending. So how could this all fall so flat?

Part of it was just the wild popularity of these actors at the time, which must have had a huge effect on casting. Well, we COULD get this-or-that actor or actress, but  Michelle Pfeiffer just had a huge hit with (insert title of hit), and wouldn't she be a bigger draw? And as I study the  so-called Golden Age of movies more closely, I realize how dicey casting can be,with a dozen actors turning down a role, maybe because their agents warned them against it (or they wouldn't be paid enough), or a thousand other actors auditioned for the role and were rejected. So exactly who gets the  gig?

You  weren't supposed to criticize Day Lewis back then, because he wasn't just an actor. He was an ECK-TORRRR. He was kind of like Montgomery Clift, in that even with Liz Taylor he had to fake sexual arousal. He was best buds with Liz, and it showed in the lack of passion in their scenes in A Place in the Sun and Raintree County. It just wasn't there. 

Do we hear of Day Lewis now? Was his middle name really "Day", or was that just an affectation to save him the embarrassment of  being plain old Daniel Lewis? Who'd remember THAT? And how dull would it look on the marquee?

It would be interesting to actually sit down with my favorite movie Mafioso and get Marty's honest take on what Lewis (LEWIS) was actually like to work with. He'd likely praise him to the skies, because that's what you were supposed to do back then.There were certain movie icons that weren't to be criticized. Meryl Streep was an untouchable goddess back then, no matter how pretentious, mannered and even ludicrous her portrayals were. This was brought home to me recently by her narration of Eleanor Roosevelt's voice in the PBS series I just re-watched. It was just  a caricature, a cartoonish take on the somewhat William Shatner-esque halting quality of her speech. Unfortunately, there were a lot of voice clips of the real Eleanor in the last episode, and it became obvious that the halting quality only showed up  very late in her life, as it often does in older people (excuse. . . me. . . yes. . . ). But she sounded like a querulous old lady when she was supposed to be 20 years old.

Why does bad acting get so richly rewarded, leading to such astonishing blunders in casting? I don't go to  movies any more because I am not interested in YET ANOTHER SUPERMAN MOVIE (or movies based on stupid video games or whatever other junk).  Sometimes I miss those long  commutes into Vancouver, mostly the anticipation of seeing something worth the trudge - but I have to tell you, quite  often the popcorn was the best part.

So why did I have such a different opinion of this movie 30-some years ago? It's the usual thing - I'm way different than when I was a mere child of 40. I've seen a lot, lived, loved, lost (etc. etc. - all the rest of it). But a lot of it comes down to the radical change in pop culture. It's almost unrecognizable now. Either Daniel Day Lewis (or Danny Lewis) has died and I don't realize it yet, or he has retired because he's too ugly like Jack Nicholson, or suffereng from dementia (and how  many actors seem to have dementia, these days?), or just got fed up with trying to pretend he was sexually attracted to cold, charisma-less actresses in parts for which they were woefully miscast.