Oscar Winning Best Actors of the '60s: 1960

Winner: BURT LANCASTER - Elmer Gantry

other nominees:

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Trevor Howard - Sons and Lovers

Jack Lemmon - The Apartment

Laurence Olivier - The Entertainer

Spencer Tracy - Inherit the Wind

I've decided to watch, in succession, the Academy Award winning Lead Actors in the decade of the 1960s. Luckily, each of the 10 films I must view are available on dvd and I own them or can access them through the wonders of NetFlix. Starting with Elmer Gantry directed by Richard Brooks and based on the novel by the brilliant Sinclair Lewis, it is evident that the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have always loved those big brassy performances that declare an actor is on the screen in all his glory. Burt Lancaster portrays Elmer Gantry a traveling salesman who, though thrown out of the seminary as a younger man, ironically finds himself in the role of an Evangelist Tent Preacher. Gantry's morals are in question from the outset as we witness his duplicity, his drinking, his lying and his obvious lascivious manner toward the fairer sex. He becomes attracted to a famous evangelist Sister Sharon Falconer, played by Jean Simmons, whom he becomes entangled with in business and eventual romance. Gantry's cynicism and hucksterism is matched by Sister Sharon true beliefs and aim to serve God and help the masses. Her blind faith is in direct contrast to Gantry's earthy snake oil salesman approach. Lancaster is perfect in the role and he is at his most charming and toothy grinned best. His Gantry is all show; over the top thespian acting, bible thumping and going to the extent of using a monkey in his preaching to waylay the criticism of Darwin believing reporters. I can't think of another role of Mr. Lancaster's wherein he nears the perfection of what people think of when they hear his name or when I would see impersonators ape him on television. It is in the style of the few swashbucklers he was in early in his career. I like this performance, but find it hard to believe the public would find truth in this man's preaching. It is so phony, so oily, so grandstanding ... yet people looking for answers and faith and verbal balms to their earthly problems wold believe in most anything, especially anything that they believe God is telling them through a man in a seersucker suit and a silver tongue spitting out authority and fear; reduced to quivering souls ready to open their wallets for salvation.

I, personally, relish Mr. Lancaster's other style of acting. His quiet eccentric character studies in Sweet Smell of Success, From Here to Eternity, Atlantic City and Local Hero. He was a great actor and one I appreciated more so in his later years. As to the film by Mr. Brooks, I found it mediocre and found it very hard to forget the novel it is based on that I had read years ago. Sinclair Lewis' scathing portrayal of Gantry is hard to forget. Mr. Brooks, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay, portrays Gantry in this light, but he softens him and wants the audience to sympathize and actually turns him into a hero, of sorts by the conclusion. I try always to separate a film from its source material. Even if I could put the novel's text aside, I still would find this turnaround of this character a bit uncomfortable and the issues of believing and God as a business are different in the film and harder to stomach. This may be a cost of the time in which the film was released; certain parts of the novel may have been hard to pass by the censors. If this was the case, and not just poor story telling on Mr. Brooks' part, then more is the pity.