Elmer Gantry is a 1960 American drama film about a confidence man and a female evangelist selling religion to small-town America.

Adapted by director Richard Brooks, the film is based on the 1927 novel of the same name by Sinclair Lewis, and stars Burt Lancaster, Jean Simmons, Arthur Kennedy, Shirley Jones and Patti Page.

The character of Sharon Falconer was loosely based on elements in the career of the Canadian-born American radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who founded the Pentecostal Christian denomination known as the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in 1927.

[Note 1] In addition, a plot point from the end of the novel is incorporated into Gantry and Lulu Bains's relationship, fundamentally changing the fates of both characters.

Elmer Gantry is a hard-drinking, fast-talking traveling salesman with a charismatic personality who infuses biblical passages and fervor into his pitches as a way to ease and collect money.

As the troupe leaves town for Kansas, Gantry sweet talks her naïve assistant Sister Rachel into disclosing information regarding Falconer's past, which he uses to con his way into her good graces.

Travelling along with Falconer is big-city reporter Jim Lefferts, who is torn between his disgust for religious hucksterism and his admiration for Gantry's charm and cunning.

An angry mob ransacks the tent revival following the publication of the incriminating photos in another newspaper, with Lulu witnessing Gantry's humiliation.

In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic A. H. Weiler was overwhelmingly positive in his assessment, calling the film "... a living, action-packed, provoking screen study, largely devoid of the novel's polemics, that captures both the eye and mind" and writing: "It is a complex story, running nearly two and a half hours, but its length is hardly noticeable since its many vignettes, each sharply presented, are joined into a theme that somewhat changes Gantry, Sister Falconer, et al. from Lewis' conception but has them shape up as forceful, and often memorable, individuals.