Lancaster was TERRIBLE in this movie.

I do not agree! There is some 1950s style overacting, but that's what they did back then. I thought he was incredibly charismatic and engaging.

Obviously, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the viewing public didn't agree.

This is one of Lancaster's most definitive screen performances, and, as one of his childhood friends stated to him in a letter after the film's release, one closest to his own personality.

True, the performance is very broad and flashy. The Gantry character is supposed to be broad and flashy, a hail-fellow-well-met, fast-talking heel of a traveling salesman who finds what he believes to be the perfect con in Sister Sharon's evangelical tent-revival meetings.

The whole point of Lancaster's performance as Gantry, the former disgraced- preacher-turned-traveling salesman, is the easy adaptability of his all-purpose sales pitch to the larger, ready-made crowds of the religiously exploited.

Lancaster was excellent in the role, and his Oscar for Best Actor was well-deserved.

I don't generally like Lancaster but am quite spellbound by his performance as I am watching it now for the first time.

But I still think he overacted atrociously.

"Baby, I don't care."

if you think his portrayal is unrealistic look at Jimmy Swaggert.

This performance is one of the show stoppers in America cinema. He is suppose to be over the top, and slimy and hateful. And BTW Lancaster never in his whole career ever did a terrible performance. And Shirley Jones, She took a chance with this movie. Before she played a virginal singing ingenues, this showed you that she was capable of way more. There us not a actor working today with maybe the exception of Gene Hackman that is in the same category as the Lancaster's and the Pecks or Cagney's. I believe today a lot of younger people who never saw these great actors have been so use to the mediocrity we have been seeing for the last 2 decades we sell ourselves short and do not know great when we see it. People now think pretty boy posers like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt are good actors, and that is very sad, no wonder the OP said he doesn't care. The actors who were considered B actor are better then most of the big ones today.

Lancaster played the part of Elmer Gantry to perfection. Who else could have pulled this off?

Seeing you and your friends "howling" with laughter would have been entertaining, a reaction to my post almost as extreme as Lancaster's performance.

"Baby, I don't care."