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| Director King Vidor |
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| Vidor on the set with Daniel L. Haynes and Nina Mae McKinney |
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| ,Nina Mae McKinney |
HALLELUJAH B- USA (109 mi) 1929 d: King Vidor
If Hallelujah is to be faulted, it is for the complete exclusion of whites, even at the prison, and the subsequent imprecision about the family’s relationship to the land they work. —Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon from King Vidor, American, 1988
King Vidor’s first sound film, frequently touted as the first all-black cast film produced in Hollywood, but it is actually predated by the more obscure HEARTS OF DIXIE (1929) starring Stepin Fetchit. Although conceived as a Movietone synchronized sound film, King Vidor’s film had to be shot silent and dubbed afterwards using sound from a studio, where the added soundtrack revolutionized the way pictures were perceived. Born in Galveston, Texas, where his father owned sawmills employing black labor, while his black nanny was more of a mother to him than his own, King Wallis Vidor transformed his childhood love of photography into documentary filmmaking by the time he was a teenager, eventually becoming one of the more distinctively poetic of all the silent film directors. Avoiding both popular imagery and musical fantasy, Vidor achieved what might be called “lyrical social realism,” a blend of subjective vision and objective reality, perhaps more evident in his Depression-era social exposé, Our Daily Bread (1934), as this film comes across as a white fantasy, a projection of black life through the eyes of a white filmmaker, as the intended audience when the film was made was primarily white, so the chosen Negro dialect from the days of slavery as well as the blatantly stereotypical shiftless behavior all fits into what was viewed as socially acceptable at the time, where black life was depicted as a form of paternalistic entertainment for white audiences. Vidor’s film was described at the time as a revolutionary, even subversive film in a racial context when “Negro films” were widely despised and black American audiences enthusiastically greeted the film. It’s important to understand that when this was made, the only black roles of any magnitude were filled by white artists in blackface, the best known of which remains Al Jolson from THE JAZZ SINGER (1927). Coming so soon after the devastating effects of the Great Depression, Hollywood’s answer was to provide commercial cinema that was primarily escapist in nature, something to take viewer’s minds off the harsh reality of the times. While activist scholar and prolific writer W.E.B. Du Bois wrote only two film reviews in his lifetime, one was a scathing review of BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), while the other offered a more positive appraisal of this film in The Crisis, “Hallelujah is a great drama. It touches the religion of a deeply superstitious people who took refuge from physical disaster in spiritual tradition, hope and fantasy…It is the sense of real life without the exaggerated farce and horseplay which most managers regard as inseparable from Negro character, that marks Hallelujah as epoch-making.” One of the observations from Du Bois is that because there are no white characters, the film as a whole is not entirely believable, yet he was especially fond of the use of “Negro folk music.” Literally steeped in gospel music, where spiritual themes are interwoven throughout the storyline, the film is conceived as a morality tale of sin and redemption, while also exploring the roots of home and community. Opting in favor of rural landscapes, opening in the cotton fields of the American South to a choral arrangement of Stephen Foster’s Way Down Upon the Swanee River, a poor black family is seen harvesting the final crop of the season, as we see their hopes and dreams wrapped around the prosperity of what they hope it will bring. This family is all smiles, fitting the white image of blacks who were happy and content with the bondage of slavery, so even after emancipation, their life and ambitions as sharecroppers are pretty much unchanged, still living in a one-room shack while toiling in the same cotton fields, yet Vidor presents this in almost idyllic, storybook fashion, where a repeated image near the beginning and end resembles a dated photograph found in any family photo album. The terms “Mammy” and “Pappy” are used affectionately as terms of endearment, yet they are holdovers from a time when reading and education were outlawed and prohibited on the plantations. Unfortunately, MGM studios asserted Vidor provides a certain “authenticity” about the black experience, as if growing up in the South adds credibility, where the dialogue initially showed little regard for the frequent use of “nigger,” “darky,” and “pickaninny,” terms that blacks openly resented, even at that time, and the actors were successful in resisting any use of such offensive language, yet this is a whitewashed and thoroughly idealized depiction of one family’s life and struggles, where an argument can be made that Vidor views black character as fixed and irredeemable, despite their best efforts to move beyond that moral straightjacket. Nonetheless, we hear Mammy remark, “T’aint what you was, it’s what you is today,” which is much more open-ended.
It’s important to note that more than six million blacks fled the hardships of the rural Jim Crow South following WWI, some opting for urban areas in the South, but most were part of the Great Migration (African American) moving out West and into the major cities of the North, where the significance of that migration was profound, opening up new opportunities, offering a promise of a renewed sense of self-reliance and self-respect, yet this reality is completely omitted from the film. For Vidor, he had little interest in depicting what life was like in established black communities, formulating their own cultures and identities, instead Vidor seems to suggest whites were in a better position than blacks to authorize an authentic black experience, as he continues to equate blacks through the prism of white ownership. As the family is introduced, we also see them singing work songs, where there is no moral distinction between gospel music and traditional field songs, as they’re all part of the black experience, but a pronounced joy comes from the naturalness of seeing their children dancing, yet these ingrained images of docile blacks, young and old, happily performing back-breaking work in the fields under the hot sun represent part of the American consciousness of the times, where there is no historical reference to slavery or reconstruction, instead the film inextricably links the black experience to religion, musicality, performance, and sexuality. We meet Parson Johnson (Harry Gray, who was actually a former slave), his wife, Mammy (Fanny Belle DeKnight), Missy Rose, his adopted daughter (Victoria Spivey), younger son Spunk (Everett McGarrity), a few younger children (Robert Couch, Milton Dickerson, and Walter Tait), and the film’s main character, the Parson’s oldest son, Zeke Johnson (Daniel L. Haynes, who served as Paul Robeson’s understudy in the Broadway musical Show Boat). A particularly affecting scene is watching them all crawl into their beds at night while each says good night to all the others, showing the intimacy of the common bond, but also how much they rely upon each other. Zeke is charged with taking the cotton the family has picked into town and getting a good return for it, bringing along his younger brother Spunk, where the processing of the cotton takes on a documentary form, while the adventure of going into a big city offers the lure of temptation, which is immediately evident once Zeke has money in his pocket, as he’s swindled by a young seductress known as Chick (Nina Mae McKinney, only 17 at the time of shooting, spotted by Vidor in the Broadway show Blackbirds), working in tandem with her gambling/hustler boyfriend Hot Shot (William Fountaine). But when Zeke quickly gets fleeced of all his money in a crooked game of craps, he suspects he’s been cheated, pulling out a switchblade with Hot Shot drawing a pistol, but in the ensuing brawl they end up accidentally shooting his brother instead, leaving him in a poor predicament, forced to return home penniless and with a dead brother in the wagon. In the weeping and moaning that follows the funeral drama, Zeke breaks out into song, finding his voice as a Baptist preacher, providing comfort to his family, while eventually broadening his reach, becoming known throughout the South as a traveling revivalist preacher, where crowds of people await to hear him, including Chick, who initially ridicules him, but the power of his sermon wins her over, but in doing so he openly reveals his sexual desire for her, sending shockwaves through his family, who can’t believe their eyes, quickly bringing some sense back to him. In response, he decides to marry the virtuous Missy, thinking this will ward off all his sinful desires. But when Chick shows up for one of his open-air river baptisms, something of a spectacle to behold, with masses of people flocking to the river in seek of salvation, her baptism goes awry, with Zeke instead throwing his life away to run off with her. It’s an interesting turn of events, with Zeke finding himself working in a sawmill, where he’s too exhausted for her when he gets home, so she quickly tires of that routine, calling upon Hot Shot to come rescue her. Their plans to escape go haywire, with Zeke chasing after them through a forest, but a buggy accident severely injures Chick after one of the wheels falls off, literally dying in his arms, before tracking down Hot Shot in an elaborate chase through a swamp and brutally killing him, a crime of passion that sends him off to a penitentiary where his punishment is breaking rocks all day as part of a chain gang.
While there’s a heavy-handed aspect to all this, with an operatic storyline that feels overdetermined, offering few real surprises, yet certainly one of them is that this is a musical, typically lighter in tone, yet this has a fatalistic darkness that can feel oppressive to watch, as the film is literally drowning in human sorrow and suffering, offering little in the way of relief, despite the grace note of the title, yet the musical numbers literally saturate this film in spirituality and human salvation, beginning with the optimism of the opening, Hallelujah! (1929) -- (Movie Clip) Ain't No Nothin' To Buy YouTube (3:27), which plays out like a dream, where the promise of tomorrow is always better than today. But tomorrows are fraught with unexpected dangers, where the soaring vocals of an Irving Berlin song lay the groundwork for the close knit family ties, reminding viewers just how much they rely upon one another, something of a refrain for the rest of the film, Hallelujah! (1929) -- (Movie Clip) Waiting At The End Of The ... YouTube (3:31), with the Dixie Jubilee Singers also credited. These songs are immediately contrasted by the earthiness of a juke joint, as Chick breaks out into a provocative blues/jazz dance number also written by Irving Berlin, Swanee Shuffle | Hallelujah | Warner Archive YouTube (4:17), with viewers alerted to the abrupt change in tone, accentuating the decadence and moral excesses of black female sexuality, where it’s easy to see how she can be described as a seductress, or a black Jezebel from the Old Testament, where vice and sin are temptations awaiting all men. The solo aspects of these Irving Berlin songs written exclusively for this picture are clearly differentiated by the choral aspect of the earlier gospel numbers, which have a way of bringing people closer together, bound in faith and spirituality, an accentuated theme of this film, which is especially pronounced in Zeke’s sermons, where people are asked to get on the train for glory and not be deterred by the impulsive temptations of the devil, a message the preacher himself fails to take to heart. Gospel sounds abound in Zeke’s transformation from sinner to preacher, where an open display of public mourning ends with the entire community completely transformed by his message, culminating with the singing of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Hallelujah! (1929) -- (Movie Clip) And Zekiel Became A Preacher YouTube (3:42). At his lowest moments, music all but disappears from the film, leaving Zeke alone to wrestle with his own conscience. But when Zeke finally returns home at the end, he is embraced not only by his loving family, but by the familiar gospel refrains that welcome him back once again, finally taking Missy for his wife, yet this also adds an element of predictability and sentimentality as well, where it’s easy to see the connections between this film and Paul Robeson’s Show Boat, especially the prominent use of a riverboat, where music dominates the emotional landscape as both take audiences through a journey through the American South. Du Bois believed firmly in the power of art, yet his initial enthusiasm was perhaps dampened by the film’s failure to address the social conditions of black communities, seemingly existing in a void, with no historical reference points and no inkling of political consciousness, where the hopes associated with an all-black cast are quickly replaced by the inevitable reality that this is largely a white depiction of that rarely seen world onscreen. Shot in and around Memphis, Tennessee during the Jim Crow era, it’s worth mentioning that the white director and film crew stayed at the prestigious Peabody Hotel, legendary for its historic charm going back to 1869, while the black actors had to stay elsewhere, interspersed throughout black neighborhoods. While the film was screened in the North to much acclaim, Southern theater owners refused to show it, preventing the film from ever making money, setting the fault lines for how black films would be exhibited in the future, a reflection of a divided nation still at odds over the racial implications from the Civil War. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in 1930 for Best Director, but Clarence Brown’s ROMANCE (1930) starring Greta Garbo ultimately prevailed, while in 2008 the film was selected into the Library of Congress National Film Registry, Complete National Film Registry Listing.
Hallelujah (1929) entire film with multiple subtitle options on Fshare TV (1:39:55)
