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 the...
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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...
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