Independent Films, Film Profiles

Hallelujah! (1929 film)
by King Vidor

Hallelujah! is an 1929 MGM musical directed by King Vidor, starring Daniel L. Haynes and the then unknown Nina Mae McKinney.Filmed in Tennessee and Arkansas and narrating the troubled quest of a sharecropper, Zeke Johnson (Haynes), and his relationship with the seductive Chick (McKinney), Hallelujah! was one of the first all-black films by a major studio. 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. Though the film is in part contrived and sometimes condescending—something King Vidor himself later admitted, his own sincerity is evident. It stands out from its contemporaries in its positive and relatively un-stereotyped treatment of an African-American subject and was considered at the time to be a breakthrough for American cinema. In fact, it was a false dawn; it has no immediate successor as an attempt at an honest treatment of African-American life. Its treatment of African-Americans is a sharp contrast to the fear and racism displayed in Birth of a Nation, which came out in 1915.Hallelujah! was King Vidor's first sound film and he demonstrated particular technological sophistication in combining sound recorded on location and sound recorded post-production back in Hollywood. 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".