Hallelujah

Hallelujah is a 1929 American pre-Code Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical directed by King Vidor, and starring Daniel L. Haynes and Nina Mae McKinney.

Filmed in Tennessee and Arkansas and chronicling the troubled quest of a sharecropper, Zeke Johnson (Haynes), and his relationship with the seductive Chick (McKinney), Hallelujah was one of the first films with an all-African American cast produced by a major studio. (Although frequently touted as Hollywood’s first all-black cast musical, that distinction more properly belongs to Hearts in Dixie, which premiered several months earlier.) It was intended for a general audience and was considered so risky a venture by MGM that they required King Vidor to invest his own salary in the production. Vidor expressed an interest in ”showing the Southern Negro as he is”[2] and attempted to present a relatively non-stereotyped view of African-American life.

Hallelujah was King Vidor’s first sound film, and combined sound recorded on location and sound recorded post-production in Hollywood.[3] King Vidor was nominated for a Best Director Oscar for the film.
In 2008, Hallelujah was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being ”culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” In February 2020, the film was shown at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, as part of a retrospective dedicated to King Vidor’s career.

The film contains two scenes of ”trucking”: a contemporary dance craze where the participant makes movements backward and forward, but with no actual change of position, while moving the arms like a piston on a locomotive wheel.

Years before creating Hallelujah, King Vidor had longed to make a film employing an all-African American cast. He had floated the idea around for years but ”the studio kept turning the idea down”. Vidor was in Europe during 1928 promoting his film The Crowd, when he heard of talking motion pictures emerging in the United States. He wanted an all-African American cast to sing ”Negro spirituals” after he had seen the success of it on Broadway. Vidor stated, ”If stage plays with all Negro casts, and stories like those by Octavus Roy Cohen and others, could have such great success, why shouldn’t the screen make a successful Negro play?” Vidor was able to convince Nicholas Schenck, who was the president of MGM at the time, to get the movie made by framing it more as a film that depicted African American’s sexual deviance. Schenck put it simply to Vidor, ”Well, if you think like that, I’ll let you make a picture about whores”. Vidor received the inspiration to create this film based on real incidents he witnessed as a child during his time at home in the south. He observed: ”I used to watch the Negroes in the South, which was my home. I studied their music, and I used to wonder at the pent-up romance in them”. Vidor began shooting in Arkansas, Memphis and Southern California at the MGM studios.

1929

NR

012569676763

USA

Mythical Popcorn DVD

Movie

Silent/Pre-Code Era

102

2018-02-07 21:42:49

1.37:1

Yes

106

United States

1929-08-20

1.33:1

1

1

Keep Case

~$9.71

2026-03-15

2018-02-07 21:42:49