Hallelujah
About Hallelujah
Zeke Johnson, a cotton sharecropper, takes the family's crop to town, is paid $100, and follows the dancer Chick into a saloon. She and Hot Shot fleece him at craps with a loaded die. In the gunfight, Zeke's brother Spunk is killed. Zeke becomes the traveling preacher Zekiel, then leaves his place, and Missy Rose, to run off with Chick. When Chick goes back to Hot Shot, Zeke chases them through a bayou. Chick dies, Zeke kills Hot Shot, serves time, and returns to a family that takes him back. Missy Rose says she still loves him.
Cast & crew
More about Hallelujah
King Vidor's first sound film, released in the United States on August 20, 1929. He wrote the story, Wanda Tuchock the scenario, Richard Schayer the treatment, and Ransom Rideout the dialogue. Hugh Wynn edited. Dialogue was recorded on location and finished in Hollywood. MGM treated the all-Black cast as a financial risk, and Vidor put his own salary into the picture.
Themes
Background
It was made in the first full year of talking pictures, with an all-Black principal cast aimed at a general audience, and it opened in August 1929, before the October stock-market crash.
In film history
A major studio paid for a feature about a Black sharecropping family, sung and spoken by a Black cast, at a time when Hollywood usually kept those roles in short comic turns.
Making
Vidor told MGM president Nicholas Schenck that the film would show sexual conduct among African Americans. Schenck's reply, as Vidor reported it, was that he could make a picture about prostitutes. Vidor's own account of the idea goes back to watching Black Southerners and their music when he was a child.
Reviews
Photoplay wrote that every member of the cast, none of whom had worked with a camera or a microphone before, gave an unstudied performance, and credited Vidor's direction. Mordaunt Hall in The New York Times called it one of the few talkies that did not play like a filmed stage piece. Later writers have split over the stereotypes in Chick's role and in the revival scenes.
Audiences
Premieres were held at the Embassy Theatre in Midtown Manhattan and the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem. Exhibitors south of the Mason-Dixon line refused the film, and it was not shown in that territory.
Look
Gordon Avil photographed the cotton country in Tennessee and Arkansas, with further scenes in Memphis, on the MGM stages in Southern California, and in a New York studio for the dance hall.
Technique
Location sound and Hollywood-recorded sound were cut together, with more mixing and track editing than most 1929 talkies used.
Music
Irving Berlin wrote songs for the film, including "Waiting at the End of the Road" and "Swanee Shuffle." Eva Jessye directed the music. Spirituals and Stephen Foster's "Old Folks at Home" sit beside the new numbers.
Preservation
In 2008 the Library of Congress placed it on the National Film Registry. The original release runs 109 minutes. A 100-minute reissue from 1939 is the cut long available on DVD.
Notes
- Hearts in Dixie, released several months earlier, was the first Hollywood musical with an all-Black cast. Hallelujah was often billed as if it held that place.
- The 1939 reissue runs 100 minutes, and that is the version that circulated on DVD.
- Nina Mae McKinney dances to Irving Berlin's "Swanee Shuffle" in the dance hall. "Waiting at the End of the Road" is sung at a revival. Workers outdoors sing "Way Down Upon the Swanee River.
- Two numbers use the dance step called trucking: the dancer pumps the arms and rocks in place without traveling.
- Eva Jessye was musical director. Harold Garrison was assistant director.
- The film entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2025.
- In February 2020 it played at the Berlin Film Festival in a King Vidor retrospective.
Scenes
- Hot Shot takes Zeke's cotton money with a loaded die, and Spunk is shot when the fight starts.
- Zekiel preaches a railroad ride to hell, then carries Chick out of the river baptism toward his tent.
- Chick is thrown from Hot Shot's buggy and dies in the mud. Zeke kills Hot Shot in the bayou.
Also available
- Internet Archive (hallelujah1929originaltheatricalprintrecreation)
