The opening shot of Elmer Gantry (1960) is the first page of the novel by Sinclair Lewis on which it is based, beginning with the line, “Elmer Gantry was drunk,” as indeed he is in the scene that follows. This suggests a more faithful adaptation than it really is.

But that’s all right because a faithful adaptation of that novel would have been prohibitively long, one in which a superficially religious scoundrel encounters and participates in the many manifestations of Christianity, replete with fraud and folly.

Instead, the movie uses as a framework the part of the novel involving Sharon Falconer, an evangelist played by Jean Simmons, and her relationship with the title character, played by Burt Lancaster.  But by itself, that would not have made much of a movie.  So, characters and incidents in the novel from before and after this section are synthesized and modified so they can be worked into the movie in order to spice things up.

The moral center of the movie is an atheist, Jim Lefferts, played by Arthur Kennedy.  At one point during one of Sharon Falconer’s tent revival meetings, Lefferts and some other reporters are sitting at a table. When she calls for a prayer, everyone starts getting on his knees, including the other reporters, but not Lefferts.  Sharon looks directly at him, asking, “Are you too proud to kneel, Mr. Lefferts? You may not believe in God, but God believes in you.”

After looking around the room at all the people kneeling, he smirks and gets on his knees, as if to say, “It means nothing to me, but I guess it means something to you.”

An atheist will typically bow his head when someone says, “Let us pray.” When in court, being sworn in under oath and hearing the words, “So help you God,” most atheists will simply say, “I do.”  I once even allowed myself to receive communion just to be polite.

But kneeling is a bit much.  So, it is no wonder that Lefferts didn’t feel like going that far.  And what did it accomplish?  Did Sharon think this was some kind of victory for God, when it was nothing but a compliant gesture on Lefferts’ part to keep from embarrassing her?

Presumably, this was a way of establishing Lefferts’ indifference to religion, even to the point of participating in a ritual he cares nothing about.

In the novel, Lefferts is not a reporter.  Instead, he is a student at Terwillinger College, founded by Baptists and strictly fundamentalist.  He is the roommate and best friend of Gantry.  His atheism expresses itself by such things as doubting that Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt or that Methuselah lived 969 years.  That seems a bit shallow and superficial, but at a college like Terwillinger in 1902, I suppose that is all one can expect.

Lefferts’ favorite thinker is Robert G. Ingersoll, known as the Great Agnostic. After Gantry allows himself to be saved one night in a moment of excitement, pressure is put upon him to make a speech.  He struggles to come up with something, but to no avail.  Finally, Lefferts says, “Why don’t you pinch your first sermon from the heathen? You won’t be the first up-and-coming young messiah to do it!”

In one of Lefferts’ books on Ingersoll, Gantry finds a speech that praises love as “the Morning and Evening Star,” going on at length at how it is the one thing that makes life worth living.  Gantry figures that the people he will be preaching to have only heard about Ingersoll, whom they despise as an atheist, so they won’t recognize the quote.  It becomes his favorite sermon, continuing to use it throughout the rest of the novel and in the movie, finding Ingersoll’s words about love more inspiring than anything he ever read in or about the Bible.

Later in the novel, we learn that he is mean to his wife, bothered by his children, and kicks his dog when no one is looking.

Lefferts likes to scandalize the faculty by disingenuously saying he doesn’t understand certain passages in the Bible, such as why Joshua needed to have God make the sun stand still during a battle when Joshua and his men could knock down big walls just by blowing trumpets.  One of the professors, a Dr. Quarles, chastises him for questioning the ways of God. The final straw is when Lefferts asks where Cain got his wife.  That evening, Dr. Quarles finds comfort from his wife, who knows about “that awful senior.”

I can’t help but think that Lewis emphasized the question of Cain’s wife because it came up in the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, in which a John T. Scopes was charged with the crime of teaching evolution in a high school in Dayton, Tennessee.  Inherit the Wind (1960) depicted that trial.  In that movie, Spencer Tracy plays Henry Drummond, who in turn represents Clarence Darrow; Frederick March plays Matthew Harrison Brady, who in turn represents William Jennings Bryan.  At one point in the novel, Gantry fancies himself the “William Jennings Bryan of the Methodist Church,” and the trial becomes the subject on an incident in the novel.

Darrow gets the idea of turning the Bible against Bryan.  At one point, he refers to the story in Genesis 4 where Cain kills Abel, after which it mentions that Cain “knew his wife,” and they had a son.  As an aside, we laugh at this euphemism “know” for sex, but it’s really no sillier than our use of the word “see” for that purpose, as in, “I’ve started seeing someone.”

Anyway, Darrow asks Bryan where Cain’s wife came from.  Bryan wisecracks that he’ll let the agnostics worry about her.  The transcript from the actual trial is a little different, but the import is the same:  Bryan shrugs off the question of Cain’s wife, saying he isn’t concerned about her.

The movie is intended for a mainstream audience, one that accepts evolution as a fact and thinks it ludicrous that there are still fundamentalists, about twenty percent of the American population at last reckoning, who believe in the literal truth of the Bible as the inspired word of God.  And so it is that Bryan is made to look like a fool.  In fact, like Dr. Quarles, he goes home to his wife for comfort, sniveling about how he is being mistreated by Darrow.

Now, Bryan was a politician, so it is understandable that, fundamentalist though he may have been, he was not prepared to answer some of the questions Darrow asked him about the Bible.  But Dr. Quarles of Lewis’s novel is a biblical scholar, so it is strange that he seems unaware that the Bible implicitly answers that question in Genesis 5:4-5, where it says that Adam lived 930 years, during which time he had sons and daughters.  In other words, Cain married one of his sisters.

So, why did Lewis make Dr. Quarles ignorant on this point?  Maybe Lewis himself never read Genesis 5. For that matter, Clarence Darrow probably didn’t read it either, even though it is the chapter right after Genesis 4, which refers to Cain’s wife.

Two other possibilities come to mind, other than a failure to turn the page and find the answer.  In marrying one of his sisters, Cain committed incest, and fundamentalists might prefer to dismiss the question as to where Cain got his wife than admit that.  But if the entire human race descended from one man and one woman, there would have to be a lot of incest along the way, in the first few generations at least.  Eventually, in Leviticus 20:17, it is stated that having sex with one’s sister is forbidden, but by that time, the population of the Earth was such that incest was no longer a necessity, just a temptation.

A second possibility is that it is hard to fully accept, even if only for the sake of the story, the idea that people lived so long in those days. Although we read that Adam lived 930 years, Methuselah, 969 years, Noah, 950 years, and so on, we tend to dismiss this kind of longevity as soon as we read about it.  In spite of ourselves, we think of these characters in Genesis as having a life expectancy similar to our own, and probably much less.  And so it is that we imagine that Cain killed Abel when he was a teenager and then got married a couple of years after that.  In fact, Cain may have killed Abel when he was, say, 103 and then got around to getting married when he was 246, plenty of time for one of Adam’s daughters to become available.

But I digress.  Let us turn to Sharon Falconer.  In the movie, she is a sincere Christian, with love in her heart.  In the novel, her religious beliefs go way beyond ordinary Christianity.  She says she cannot sin because she is sanctified.  So, even if she does what for others would be a sin, such as fornicating, in her case she remains pure.  She says she is the reincarnation of Joan of Arc, of Catherine of Siena.  She says she is better than any men evangelists because they are only God’s message, whereas she is “God’s right hand.”  She thinks she is the essence of the Virgin Mary and every goddess of every pagan religion, ultimately believing that she will be the next Messiah.

In both the novel and the movie, it all comes to an end one night when fire breaks out in the tabernacle that she had finally been able to build.  So strong is her belief in God that she fails to bolt for the exit like everyone else, thinking that God will protect her, refusing even Gantry’s efforts to save her.  As a result, she dies.

In the movie, her assistant tries to talk Gantry into continuing with her work, to which he responds, “‘When I was a child, I spake as a child. I understood as a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things.’ St. Paul, First Corinthians, 13:11.”  There is a deliberate ambiguity in the “childish things” to which Gantry refers, aside from what Paul had in mind at the time.  Is he referring to revival meetings only or to religion in all forms?  He is holding what is left of Sharon’s Bible, but possibly only as a keepsake.  In either event, the movie ends suggesting that Gantry has learned something from the experience, that he will become a better person now. There is no such line in the novel, where Gantry continues with his selfish, hypocritical ways while rising ever higher in the Christian hierarchy.

It is interesting that of all the ways Sharon Falconer could have died, Lewis chose to kill her off in a fire, which naturally suggests Hell.  I suppose it was intended as a bit of irony.  In the novel, one of Gantry’s fellow students, who becomes a minister, starts wondering about the point of religion. Perhaps, he suspects, it is just “fire insurance.”

Falconer’s character is said to be based on that of Aimee Semple McPherson, a prominent evangelist of the 1920s, although only loosely. For one thing, McPherson never died in a fire.  However, in The Miracle Woman (1931), Barbara Stanwyck plays Florence Fallon, a character also based on McPherson. Perhaps inspired by the Sharon Falconer of the novel, the producers of this movie have Sister Fallon almost die in a fire during a revival, but she is saved by her lover, a blind veteran of the Great War.

At the beginning of that movie, she is embittered by her father’s death and is talked into becoming a phony evangelist, milking the gullible for profit.  To that end, her manager arranges to have plenty of shills pretend to be crippled, deformed, or impaired in some way, and then have them miraculously cured by Fallon.

In Lewis’s novel, Gantry and Falconer find that the show becomes more profitable when they add healing to the performance.  Gantry even buys a bunch of crutches to put on display, supposedly collected from those who threw them away after being healed.  The movie minimizes this feature.  A man who is deaf is brought to Falconer one night.  His wife says a storm woke him up one night, and he screamed that he could not hear the thunder.  In other words, his deafness is psychosomatic rather than physiological.  So, it is no wonder that Falconer is able to heal him with the power of suggestion.  As a result, we are not asked to believe that a real miracle has occurred.

In The Miracle Woman, Fallon’s faith in God is restored.  She quits the fraudulent business of being an evangelist and joins the Salvation Army. She receives a telegram from her lover saying that the doctors believe they might be able to cure his blindness.  In other words, there will be no miracle restoring his sight, only medical science.

When we use the word “miracle” today, we typically mean that an unlikely but most fortunate event has occurred, not that God has intervened in the natural course of things.  For most people, miracles in the strict sense of the word, in which the laws of nature have been overruled by divine intervention, belong to biblical antiquity, not the twentieth century. Although The Miracle Woman redeems Fallon at the end, bringing her back to God, thereby affirming the goodness of religion, it would have been too much to have her lover get his sight restored through an actual miracle. The movie would then have come across as phony, provoking derision from the audience.

Except for a brief appearance toward the end, Lefferts disappears from the novel after he leaves college, so he is not part of the story with Sister Falconer. Another character from early in the novel is Lulu, a naïve girl whom Gantry seduces.  When her father finds out they have been having sex, a shotgun marriage is threatened. Gantry wiggles out of it, and she marries someone else.  Years later, she shows up again, ready for seconds.

In the movie, Lulu, played by Shirley Jones, is given a different past.  Her father caught her and Gantry having sex, after which Gantry left town and her father disowned her, forcing her to go into a life of prostitution.  She wants revenge, setting up a situation entrapping Gantry.  Lefferts is too upright to print the photos of their encounter in his newspaper, regarding them as part of a blackmail scheme, but they are made public in a tabloid.  When Lulu sees how Gantry is pilloried, people throwing rotten food at him, she regrets what she has done, admitting in the newspaper that she framed him.  He recovers from the scandal, but shortly after there is the fire.

There is a badger game worked on Gantry in the novel, but Lulu has nothing to do with it.  Gantry gets out of it when a private detective presents the woman who set him up with information about her criminal past and how the police are still looking for her in Seattle, forcing her to recant her story and leave town with her husband.

Finally, there is the character of Elmer Gantry himself.  As noted above, the opening scene in the movie takes place in a bar, where Gantry is drunk, on Christmas Eve no less.  He is with some fellow salesmen, telling dirty jokes.  A couple of women enter the bar asking for donations for poor orphans.  They are sneered at by most of the men Gantry is with, but he intercedes on behalf of the women, pleading their cause and coercing his companions to donate. We suspect he is doing this more out of a desire to show off his rhetorical skills than out of concern for those orphans.

One of the salesmen he was joking around with balks when Gantry reaches for the plate of money intended to pay for his own drinks. Gantry replies:

What’s your beef, mister? You ashamed of being a Christian? I see. You think religion is for suckers and easy marks and mollycoddles, huh? You think Jesus was some kind of a sissy, eh? Let me tell you, Jesus wouldn’t be afraid to walk in here or any speakeasy to preach the gospel. Jesus had guts! He wasn’t afraid of the whole Roman army. Think that quarterback’s hot stuff? Well, let me tell you, Jesus would have made the best little all-American quarterback in history. Jesus was a real fighter. The best little scrapper, pound for pound, you ever saw.  And why, gentlemen? Love! Jesus had love in both fists.

At that point, he begins quoting Ingersoll, without attribution, of course.

I saw this movie when it first came out and again a little over ten years later on television.  At the time, I figured it just made sense that a man with Burt Lancaster’s athletic build might say something like that.

But lately, I have become aware that masculine Christianity is something that has been around for a long time.  Sure, I knew that white evangelicals had enthusiastically endorsed conservative politicians, and I have been hearing a lot recently from Republicans about masculinity and the patriarchal family, but I never really put the two together, thinking they were independent variables. Not even when I heard that a lot of young men are attracted to Orthodox Christianity in an effort to get away from the feminized versions of that religion found elsewhere did I catch on.   Not even when I saw a picture of a musclebound Christ on the cross.

It all finally came together when I read Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez. She points out that support for Republicans on the part of white evangelicals and the emphasis conservatives place on masculinity are two aspects of a single movement, one with an extensive history, something that Lewis emphasized in his novel.

It is not surprising that something like that had to happen.  Jesus may have preached to the weak, the poor, and the downtrodden, but once Christianity came to be embraced by the rich and powerful, his message needed to be adjusted accordingly.

Most movie versions of The Scarlet Letter jump right into the story of Hester Prynne in Boston during the middle of the seventeenth century, leaving out “The Custom-House,” the introductory chapter of the novel.  I suppose the main purpose of this chapter is to give the impression that the story Nathaniel Hawthorne is about to tell is based on true events, in which a woman is forced to wear a scarlet “A” on her bosom for being guilty of adultery.

The 1979 television mini-series does go so far as to include that part of “The Custom-House” where the author discovers some documents, a manuscript, and a scarlet letter, which become the basis for the story.

That, however, comes only toward the end of that chapter.  The purpose of the first part would seem to be that of explaining the author’s sentimental attachment to Salem, Massachusetts, where the custom-house is located, while at the same time distancing himself from the Puritans that founded it and of whom he is a descendant.  He says that these Puritans would likely regard him as an idler, while he in turn casually remarks that these ancestors of his may well be spending eternity in Hell for their cruelty.

So, what was it that made these Puritans so evil?  Hawthorne seems to be of the opinion that it was the fact that their women were ugly.  Perhaps he thought that it was being unattractive that made these women mean and intolerant, but I get the impression that he believes that an ugly body will just naturally have an ugly soul.  Either way, these women provided the cruelty that lies at the heart of Puritanism.

It is our good fortune, Hawthorne avers, that in each successive generation, the women became more attractive, and with that were blessed with a more pleasant disposition, until the time of his writing, where the women were as pretty and good-natured as any man might want.  And so it was that as the women became better looking, the Puritan religion dissipated.

In “Chapter II, The Market-Place,” Hawthorne describes the women that are waiting in the crowd to see the humiliation of Hester Prynne and her baby:

Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less force and solidity, than her own. The women who were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex.

As noted above, Hawthorne would have us believe that the story he tells is true, based as it is on the documents and manuscript found in the custom-house.  So, we have to wonder how he knows all this about the women.  Was there a letter among the documents in the custom-house where someone comments, “Boy! These women in Boston sure are ugly.” And was there an additional document, dated many decades later, where someone comments, “It sure is strange the way Sally is so much better looking than her mother was, and who in turn has had a daughter even prettier than she.”

Now, we readily grant that in creating a story based on the documents and manuscript he discovered, Hawthorne must be allowed the freedom to imagine what thoughts are running through someone’s head or what that person might be doing when alone in a room.  But his assertions regarding the increasing beauty of women in the two subsequent centuries go beyond what license we willingly permit the author for the sake of the story and take us into the realm of some kind of fantastic metaphysics in which spiritual progress has been a function of the way women were becoming prettier.

As for the men, one of the women in the crowd comments, “The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch,—that is a truth.”  She goes on to say that instead of having to wear a scarlet “A” on the bodice of her gown, Hester should have had an “A” branded on her forehead with a hot iron. However, another woman, whom Hawthorne characterizes as “the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges,” says she should be put to death.

Though Hawthorne believes that the essence of Puritanism lay in its ugly women, yet he does not mean to imply that such women were revered.  Rather, they often seem to be despised.  One of the men in the crowd, upon hearing what these women have to say, reprimands them, calling them “gossips” and telling them to be quiet.

In fact, ugly women were in danger of being accused of witchcraft.  The very scaffold upon which Hester is to be displayed with her baby and scarlet letter is the one where Hawthorne says a Mistress Hibbins, who had a “sour” face and an “ill-omened physiognomy,” would be hanged three years hence for being a witch.

Hester’s beauty, on the other hand, was sufficient to remind one of the Virgin Mary:

Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent….

Lest he be accused of blasphemy, however, Hawthorne is quick to add that this thought would occur to that imagined Papist “only by contrast [with] that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world.”

Still, Hawthorne’s prejudice regarding a woman’s physical features is merely being carried to the next level:  if ugly women are vindictive, and attractive women forgiving, then a beautiful woman must partake of the divine, as indeed Hester does as the years go by, becoming a “Sister of Mercy,” being of aid and comfort to the very people that had condemned her, who came to say of her that she was “so kind to the poor, so helpful to the sick, so comfortable to the afflicted!”

In fact, it is Hester’s beauty that is a major reason why she is not being put to death, as a man in the crowd explains to a stranger, the very man who turns out to be her husband, Roger Prynne:

“Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking themselves that this woman is youthful and fair, and doubtless was strongly tempted to her fall,—and that, moreover, as is most likely, her husband may be at the bottom of the sea,—they have not been bold to put in force the extremity of our righteous law against her. The penalty thereof is death.  But in their great mercy and tenderness of heart, they have doomed Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the remainder of her natural life, to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom.”

From this we may gather that had Hester been plain and frumpy, the magistrates would have been less merciful, reasoning that because no man would have gone out of his way to tempt her, she would have had less excuse for giving in to her sexual desires, probably luring to her bed some hapless fellow who succumbed in a moment of weakness.  Justice is not blind.

The movies of 1926 and 1934 are faithful to the novel in this regard, where we see unattractive women expressing their hostility toward Hester, with only the occasional young woman with delicate features expressing some degree of sympathy for her.  In the 1934 version, while the homely women watch with stern faces as the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale preaches about sin and iniquity, it is a young, pretty woman that falls asleep, whom the usher has to wake up.  We know that she is of the future, where pretty women will discard the dark days of Puritanism.

In the 1979 version, however, this correlation between soul and body is not maintained.  There is an attractive woman that is snide and catty to Hester, and Mistress Hibbins appears to be pleasant in appearance.

In any event, while Hawthorne may have delighted in portraying the Puritan religion in the worst possible light, the 1934 version of this story is more circumspect, for it begins with an exculpatory prologue:  “Though to us, the customs seem grim and the punishments hard, they were a necessity of the times and helped shape the destiny of a nation.”

How they were a “necessity of the times” is not explained, as if it is a given that these people could not have survived had they been tolerant and forgiving. And while there is no doubt that these Puritans helped to shape the future of this nation, we may take exception to the word “destiny,” which has a positive connotation, for this nation might well have been better off had the Puritans stayed in England.

Of course, this movie was made when the Production Code forbade putting religion in a bad light, and the prologue undoubtedly served to assuage the misgivings of the censors who were not sure there should be a movie version of this novel at all.

In this 1934 version, a man points out that by the laws of Moses, a woman guilty of adultery should be put to death by stoning.  He is, of course, referring to Leviticus 20:10-12 and Deuteronomy 22:21-24.  This was what the woman in the novel was referring to when she said Hester deserved death. That Hester’s punishment is limited to wearing a scarlet letter is what the other woman meant by saying the men were too merciful.

Speaking of which, in the 1926 version, a man is punished by having to wear a sign saying, “Wanton Gospeller.”  There is no reference to this man or his sign in the novel, but we may imagine that he was being punished for preaching from the Bible in a manner inconsistent with what was deemed proper by the Puritan community, presumably by citing those passages that are about love and forgiveness.  He might even have had the temerity to relate the story of the adulteress from John 8:1-11.  In that community, however, should he have said that the one who is without sin should cast the first stone, he would likely have been pelted many times over.

In the 1934 version, however, the Reverand Arthur Dimmesdale does mention that story from the New Testament to the governor, but since Dimmesdale is the one who got Hester pregnant, his argument is self-serving.  It is easy to forgive the sins of which one has been guilty.  In any event, the governor dismisses that story about Jesus as being too lenient.

After “The Custom-House,” the story in the novel begins in medias res. However, the 1926 version tells the story chronologically.  This spoils the surprise of later discovering that it was Dimmesdale that had sex with Hester, although we so love it when a man of God is brought low after lecturing others about sin that we would likely have hoped for that outcome in any event.

In that 1926 movie, when Dimmesdale finds out that Hester is pregnant, he suggests that they get married.  She tells him, however, that she is already married to a man who was supposed to follow her to Boston but never arrived. She suspects he is dead but has no certainty in this regard.

This is a mistake.  If Dimmesdale does not know she is married, then presumably no one else in the community knows that either, in which case, she might be guilty only of fornication rather than adultery. However, the novel makes it clear that everyone knows the story of how she married a man in England before coming to Boston.

Still, her being married would not have stopped them from leaving Boston. They should have made plans to leave as soon as she found out she was pregnant.  In fact, that is what they eventually plan to do seven years later, only Dimmesdale dies right after his public confession. Considering the fact Hester’s punishment might have been death, he should have gotten her out of town before she was even showing.  It would have been the Christian thing to do.

Perhaps this is the biggest objection to the 1995 version, where Dimmesdale does not die after confessing.  When he, Hester, and their daughter Pearl all proceed to leave Boston and live happily ever after in the Carolinas, it underscores the fact that they could have done that to begin with.  The whole seven years of humiliation and suffering was as pointless as it was unnecessary.

If it is a mystery why Hester and Dimmesdale didn’t leave Boston immediately, it is an even greater mystery why she ever married Roger Prynne.  He shows up the day Hester is brought from prison to stand upon the scaffold, holding her baby, and displaying her scarlet letter “A.” Outraged at what he sees, he plans to avenge himself on the man who had sex with her, but as he is ashamed of being a cuckold, he does not reveal himself to be Hester’s husband, but says his last name is Chillingworth.

When he gets a chance to talk to Hester alone, Roger admits that he wronged Hester by persuading her to marry him, for she had youth and beauty, while he was ugly, decaying from old age, misshapen from birth (specifically, a hunchback). She in turn admits that she wronged him, saying only that she told him from the beginning that she felt no love for him nor feigned any. Because they wronged each other, Roger says they are even.  He seeks revenge only against the man that wronged them both.

In saying in her defense that she told Roger from the beginning that she neither loved him nor would pretend such love, Hester probably thought herself virtuous, in that she had been honest with Roger.  But when a woman is no longer willing to lie to her husband, that marriage is over, and in this case, even before it began.

Given her declaration, we can only wonder why she should have married him. While standing on the scaffold, her memory takes her back to England, from the time she was born until she married Roger and moved with him to Amsterdam. From there, he sent her to America, promising to follow her shortly after tidying up his affairs.  But in none of these recollections do we understand why she agreed to marry him. Given how beautiful she is, there should have been plenty of young men to court her, from whom she might have had her pick.

To what end, therefore, does the author make Roger physically repulsive? We can easily imagine an alternative story, one in which Roger was young and handsome when they married, and that they truly loved each other. But when a year went by and he did not show up, it would still be understandable that she would give in to her sexual desires for another man.

The explanation must lie in Hawthorne’s belief in a correlation between spiritual and physical features. The man in this novel that has even more hatred in his heart than the ugly women of Boston is also the one man in the novel who is himself ugly.  Remarks are made by various people, including the author, to the effect that Roger is like the “Black Man” or Satan, and that his determination to torment Hester’s lover is akin to Satan’s gaining possession of a man’s soul.

Later in the novel, after Roger has discovered that it was Dimmesdale that impregnated Hester, she tries to talk Roger out of seeking revenge against him. In reply, he says, “It is not granted me to pardon. I have no such power as thou tellest me of. My old faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and explains all that we do, and all we suffer….”  In other words, he was not religious when he married Hester.  But now that he is full of so much hatred, he needs religion to give it meaning.  To match such wickedness, Hawthornian logic requires that he be deformed.

I noted above that the 1979 version did not maintain the correlation between the physical and spiritual ugliness of the women that was in the novel.  It deviated from this even more so in the character of Roger.  He was played by Kevin Conway, who was only thirty-seven years old at the time. Conway admitted that Hester’s marriage to Roger was inexplicable, so it was decided that when Roger first arrives in Boston, he would look not like Igor, but rather be depicted as a man of vitality, one whom we might believe Hester could have married and been happy with had things worked out differently. Only later in the movie did the makeup artist make him appear older and fiercer. Needless to say, this requires that we forget what was said earlier about how things were back in England, where Roger had a decaying, misshapen body, and how Hester declared that she did not love him and would not fake it.

The 1995 version tries its hand at explaining why Hester married Roger. Referring to her father, a man asks, “ls it true he was in debt to your husband, and you were the payment?”  I suppose such a thought might reasonably occur to a Puritan, for the Bible tells you how to sell your daughter (Exodus 21:7-11). Hester does not answer him, but the audience is expected to accept this, nevertheless.  I don’t suppose I need to mention that there is no hint of that in the novel.  But then, a lot of stuff goes on in this version that is not in the novel.

After seven years, it finally occurs to Hester to leave Boston.  Dimmesdale likes the idea.  Somehow, Roger finds out about their plan and books passage on the same ship leaving for Europe, planning on following them wherever they go.  However, before they leave, Dimmesdale stands upon the scaffold and confesses his sin, revealing an “A” on his own chest.  The strain is so much that he dies.

A year later, Roger dies too, leaving Pearl an inheritance.  Yeah, sure, why not?

Hester and Pearl sail to England.  After a time, Hester returns, and when she dies, she is buried next to Dimmesdale, sharing a single tombstone, bearing the letter “A.”

As for Pearl herself, she seems to be the happiest person in the novel.  As a child, while living with her mother on the outskirts of Boston, she became something of a free spirit, allowed to play and have fun. When she became of age in England, she married an aristocrat.  And as she was described, even as a child, as having a “rich and luxuriant beauty,” we can be sure that she sluffed off what little of the Puritan religion she was exposed to.

Clara Bow’s Tabloid Past

Knowing that Call Her Savage was a Pre-Code movie, I sat down to watch it expecting the usual hints at immoral sexuality that would be forbidden once the Production Code started being rigorously enforced in 1934.  For example, at one point the movie features a nightclub for gays and lesbians, for we see a man with his arm around another man, and a woman with her arm around another woman.  The entertainment consists of a performance by a couple of effeminate waiters, singing something about a sailor in his pajamas, and how they would like to be chambermaids on a big battleship.

Earlier in the movie, however, there is a scene where Clara Bow starts playing with her Great Dane, at one point even getting underneath him.  I was ashamed of myself for the thought that popped into my head. I told myself that if I revealed what I was imagining here, people would think I was some kind of twisted pervert.  And so it was that I intended skip over this part.  But then I thought, it wouldn’t hurt just to Google it.  It was then that I found that others had had a similar reaction, that there was a hint of bestiality in that scene.

The internet is one thing, and respectable film criticism is something else again.  With that in mind, I turned to the last word on the subject, Thomas Doherty’s Pre-Code Hollywood:  Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934.  On page 104, he lists, among the many violations of the Hayes Code in Call Her Savage, Clara Bow’s “erotic frolicking with a Great Dane.”

In the same paragraph, moreover, Doherty says that Bow’s life was full of scandal. Rather than retire from public view, Call Her Savage was a comeback vehicle for her, one in which she flaunted the features of her lurid life. “Making the best of the tabloid headlines,” Doherty says, “Call Her Savage invited audiences to link the affairs of the actress with the antics of the lusty hellion she played on the screen.” It would be like Fatty Arbuckle making a movie in which he tells a woman at a party, “Things go better with Coke.”

We always knew in general that life reflects art, and art reflects life, but that is especially so in this movie. I normally have little interest in the personal lives of actors, caring only about what I see on the big screen, but I made an exception in this case, looking into her biography.  And yes, there were tabloid stories of Bow having sex with her dog.

This reminded me of the movie The Scarlet Empress (1934), in which Marlene Dietrich plays Princess Sophia in her eventual rise to power as Catherine the Great.  There is the story, possibly apocryphal, that she died while having sex with her horse.  The harness holding up the horse broke, and she was crushed to death when it fell on top of her.  It’s easier for a man.  All he has to do is get his horse stump broke. But then, when it comes to sex, things are often easier for men.  In any event, at the end of the movie, Catherine the Great is seen standing next to a mighty steed, thereby hinting at the scurrilous rumor concerning the death of this historical figure.

The First Generation

When Call Her Savage begins, we see a wagon train crossing the state of Texas, being led by a man named Silas.  Everyone knows that Silas is committing adultery with a woman in the last covered wagon.

Two old men are talking about it.  We never learn the name of one of the men, but he is played by Russell Simpson and will be referred to as such.  The other man is Mort, and he says, “No good will come of it. You’ll see.  He’ll bring down the wrath of God on all of us.”

Let’s stop for a moment to consider this.  The question is not, what are we to make of this?  For that answer will vary, depending on one’s religious nature, ranging from Christian fundamentalist to atheist. Rather, the question is, what does the movie want us to make of this?  As a general rule, movies do not expect the audience to agree with an old coot like Mort, with his talk of the wrath of God, an Old Testament God that will punish an entire community for the sins of just one man. Therefore, even though Indians appear on the horizon right after he says that, we would normally be expected to regard it as mere coincidence.

The Indians fail in their attack on the wagon train, and they ride off.  The few settlers that were killed are buried, and Silas leads a prayer for them, while we hear “Abide with Me” in the background: “And we ask God, in His infinite mercy, to take them to His bosom, that they might dwell in the Kingdom of Heaven, forever and ever.  Amen.”

This is the kind of God that movies usually approve of, although it also makes sense that a sinner like Silas would prefer a loving and forgiving God to the wrathful Deity that Mort was invoking.

Anyway, Silas walks over to Mort, who is lying on the ground, slowly dying. Mort rises up a bit, accusing Silas and that woman he was with, whom he refers to as a Jezebel and a harlot, of being responsible for the communal punishment God has inflicted on those they just buried.  Silas puts his foot on Mort’s neck, forcing him to the ground, crushing his windpipe.

Simpson comes up to Silas, saying it’s against God what he’s been doing.  Silas says it doesn’t matter because Mort would have been dead by sundown anyway. Simpson says he’s not worried about Mort. Rather, he is talking about Silas’s daughter Ruth.  “A man passes his nature on to his children, Silas, and your nature is bad.  The good book says the sins of the father will be passed on to his children, even unto the third and the fourth generation.”

The reference is to Exodus 20:5, where God is giving Moses the Ten Commandments.  It is not clear to me whether that passage means it is the sins of the father or the guilt of the father that is passed on. Simpson seems to be saying the former, in which case, Silas’s children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren will also be sinful.  However, it might mean that even if the father’s progeny are themselves innocent, they have inherited his guilt and will therefore be punished.

I take it to mean the latter.  For example, as told in 2 Samuel 11-12, David and Bathsheba commit adultery, and then David has her husband Uriah murdered to get him out of the way.  For that reason, God kills their baby.  The doctrine of original sin aside, the baby was clearly innocent, certainly as innocent as any other baby that gets born every day, except for the fact that it had inherited David’s guilt and therefore deserved punishment.

Nevertheless, I think that when Simpson says what he does to Silas, he means that Silas’s sinful nature will be passed on to his daughter Ruth.  In either event, the idea in the Bible seems to be that the method of transmission is supernatural, that God has ordained this inheritance.

When Mort spoke of the wrath of God being visited upon them, he struck us as one of those fanatical religious types that the movies always portray in a bad light. But Simpson impresses us as being more level-headed, so we begin to wonder if the movie wants us to take this stuff seriously.

The Second Generation

Just before the Indians attacked the wagon train, we saw two children playing, Silas’s daughter Ruth and a boy named Pete, who was pretending to be an Indian, threatening to scalp Ruth.  Eighteen years later, Pete and Ruth have grown up and gotten married. But he neglects her.  Sitting in a wagon, about to go on a trip, he yells to Ruth to say goodbye to him.  She is bathing, but she wraps a towel around her and comes to the window.  After he leaves, she lies on the bed naked, except for the towel. No question about it, she is unfulfilled. Rising to the occasion is Ronasa, Ruth’s Indian servant. He has the love she needs. However, he tells her he must leave her because his father wants him to marry some squaw that he cares nothing about.  Before he departs, he and Ruth have desperate sex out in the woods, which we know is hot and passionate because Ronasa is an Indian. As a result of their union, Ruth gives birth to Nasa.

At this point, we again get the quotation about visiting the iniquity of the father on his progeny, adding the introductory phrase, “For I am a jealous God,” which is also part of Exodus 20:5.  This time, however, it is not uttered by any character in the movie, but rather is written as an intertitle, with two tablets behind it of the sort on which the Ten Commandments were written. This makes it clear that we are supposed to regard this as literally true.  In addition, the movie probably wants us to believe that Mort was right after all, that God had the Indians attack the wagon train because Silas was committing adultery.

The Third Generation

Clara Bow plays Nasa when she grows up.  We know, as she does not, that her biological father was Ronasa.  After lashing her half-breed friend Moonglow (Gilbert Roland) forty times with her whip, while he just stands there and takes it because he loves her, she says she doesn’t understand herself, why she is so wild and angry all the time.  Her savage nature cannot be blamed solely on her being a half-breed because Moonglow is also a half-breed, and he is not wild and angry at all. It must be that, in addition, she has inherited the sins of Silas.

In an effort to tame her, Pete, her (legal) father, sends her to a girls’ school in Chicago, but that only gives her more opportunity to express her sinful nature. Then Pete tries to make her marry a man she doesn’t love.  When she refuses, he says he never wants to see her again.

The man she does end up marrying is Lawrence Crosby.  He marries her only because he wants to make his mistress jealous.  That mistress is Sunny De Lane (Thelma Todd), whom he broke up with because she had been “weekending” him.  But she is the one he really wants because she is willing to cater to his “peculiarities.”  We subsequently get an idea about one of those peculiarities.  While talking to Nasa at a party, he sees Sunny arrive.  After telling Nasa who she is, he makes a Freudian slip.  While looking directly at Sunny, he says, “Mother.”

Crosby leaves Nasa after one night of marriage, telling her she will have credit at either of his banks. Months later, a lawyer tells her Crosby is dying, and that it would be wise to visit him so that she can continue to get her allowance. During her visit, he tries to rape her.  His doctor says his mind is infected. That sounds like syphilis to me.  However, the doctor says he can be cured with the proper care, presumably with Salvarsan and bismuth.

The Fourth Generation

The next month, Nasa has a baby.  Oddly enough for a Pre-Code movie, her baby is legitimate. She expresses concern as to whether the baby is all right, which suggests apprehension about syphilis again. That would be one way of passing down the sins of the father, but I believe only supernatural transmission is what the Bible had in mind.

Because Crosby cuts off her allowance, we slowly see the effect of her impoverishment, as she loses her fancy clothes and starts living in a cheap hotel. She looks at a prescription for the baby: ephedrine sulphate and chlorotone, drugs that might be used to treat the side effects of Salvarsan and bismuth.

Of course, if the baby had syphilis, then so too would Nasa.  Later in the movie, Crosby appears, completely cured and paired up with Sunny again, so I guess we can imagine Nasa taking the cure too.  I know it’s not terribly realistic.  The treatment we are talking about took years, but I still think that was supposed to be the idea.  An even more unrealistic example occurs in The Road to Ruin (1934).  In that movie, a woman is given the Wassermann test, and the result is positive.  In what appears to be a week or two later, she is cured.

Alone with a sick baby to take care of, and no money to pay for its medicine, she turns to prostitution. The first two men who approach her on the street for sex completely disgust her, but she is able to tolerate the third one.  She has sex with him and then uses the money he gave her to buy the medicine. By the time she returns to her apartment, however, there has been a fire, and her baby has suffocated.   After all, the baby was the fourth generation of Silas and had inherited his sins.  Therefore, it was deserving of God’s wrath.

Soon after, she finds out that Silas has died and left her $100,000.  (Adjusted for inflation, that would be just over $2,000,000 today.)  She says, “I’ll get even with life.”  At first, I wondered why she didn’t say she was going to get even with men, given the way she had been treated by Pete and Crosby, in addition to the disgust she felt when men approached her on the street for sex.

I think the reason for her turn of phrase, “get even with life” instead of “get even with men,” goes back to Bow’s reason for making this movie.  Scandals about her had caused her to have a nervous breakdown, and now, with this movie, she was getting even, after a fashion, by defiantly putting her sordid sexuality on the screen.  Nevertheless, she does seem to have it in for men, hiring a gigolo so she can treat him like dirt.

In the end, Nasa receives a letter from her mother Ruth that she is dying.  She returns home to Texas.  In her dying moments, Ruth gives Nasa just enough information for her to figure out that Ronasa was her real father.  Nasa tells Moonglow that she is a half-breed like him, so they can get married and live happily ever after.  I don’t know if God is all through punishing the generations of Silas, however, so maybe they shouldn’t have children, just in case.