Writer-director Richard Brooks has made significant changes in adapting the novel to the screen. Gantry, a womanizer who loves life and every femme he meets, then falls for Lulu Baines (cast against type Shirley Jones), once a preacher’s daughter and now a prostitute bent on revenge. The character of Sharon Falconer was based on elements in the career of Aimee Semple McPherson, a Canadian-born American evangelist who founded the Pentecostal Christian denomination known as the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in 1927. Gantry becomes her lover but loses both her and his position when she is killed in a fire at her new tabernacle. He acts as manager for Sharon Falconer, an itinerant evangelist. Together, they become rich and famous enough for Sister Falconer to build her own huge seaside temple.
When he encounters Sister Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons), a role inspired by the real-life Aimee Semple McPherson, he appeals to her vanity and joins her camp. Gantry marries well and obtains a large congregation in Lewis’s fictional Midwestern city of Zenith. He briefly acts as a “New Thought” evangelist, and later becomes a Methodist minister.ĭuring his career, Gantry contributes to the downfall, injury, and death of key people around him, including minister Frank Shallard. A notorious and cynical alcoholic, Gantry is mistakenly ordained as a Baptist minister. A narcissistic, womanizing college athlete, he abandoned his ambition to become a lawyer, because the legal profession did not suit his personality and lifestyle. Hargett, Bert Fiske, and Robert Nelson Horatio Spencer, who was rector of a large Episcopal parish, Grace and Holy Trinity Church.Įlmer Gantry (Lancaster) first appears on the screen drunk, trying to mooch drinks while selling his own distinctive take on scripture with his remarkable gift of gab. Other ministers Lewis interviewed included Burris Jenkins, Earl Blackman, I. Stidger introduced Lewis to other clergymen, including Reverend Leon Milton Birkhead, a Unitarian and an agnostic.
“Big Bill” Stidger, pastor of the Linwood Boulevard Methodist Episcopal Church in Kansas City, Missouri. Sinclair Lewis conducted research for his novel by observing the work of preachers in Kansas City in his so-called “Sunday School” meetings on Wednesdays.
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