Hallelujah! (1929 film)
| Hallelujah! | |
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| Directed by | King Vidor |
| Produced by | King Vidor Irving Thalberg |
| Written by | King Vidor Ransom Rideout Richard Schayer Wanda Tuchock |
| Starring | Daniel L. Haynes Nina Mae McKinney William E. Fountaine Harry Gray Fannie Belle de Knight |
| Music by | Irving Berlin |
| Cinematography | Gordon Avil |
| Edited by |
Anson Stevenson Hugh Wynn |
| Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
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Release date
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Running time
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109 minutes (original release), 100 minutes (1939 re-issue, the version available on DVD) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
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 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. Vidor expressed an interest in "showing the Southern Negro as he is" 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. 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."
Years before creating Hallelujah!, King Vidor had longed to make a film employing an all-Black cast. He had floated the idea around for years but “the studio kept turning the idea down”. Vidor’s luck would change come 1928, when while he is in Europe promoting his film, The Crowd, he catches wind of the emergence of audible motion pictures sweeping the nation. This was important because he was very enthusiastic about the idea of having an all-Black cast singing “negro spirituals” on the silver screen, 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 the 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, where he would observe Black folks. He went on to say, “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.
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