Hallelujah (1929)

King Vidor was a pretty powerful director in his day, even in the silent era he'd already made the The Big Parade and a number of other successful film and he had enough pull to get MGM to agree to make a musical staring an entirely black cast, in 1929! Hallelujah was really more of a drama with musical interludes, not really a musical as we think of them today, all the singing is within the logic of the story, hymns, popular deities, things the characters are really suppose to be singing, not simply a means of conveying inner dialogue. Of course the musical form as it relates to cinema was still being shaped, and while this movie bears some historical note as part of that process where it really stands out is that it was a major studio film about black people, again in 1929!

Of course the film hasn't aged particularly well, in a very early scene we are introduced to three black brother named Sears, Roebuck, and Coe, it makes you whence a little. The film has an entirely black cast, a first for an A production by a major studio, and much of the cast were not professional actors. Daniel L. Haynes plays Zeke, a good looking but simple farmer who is taken advantage of by a world wise chick named Chick (Nina Mae McKinney, really sexy, in a different world she would have been a big star). Zeke loses the proceeds from the family cotton harvest in a con for which Chick served as bait, in trying to get it back his younger brother is killed and Zeke's long, dark night of the soul results in his rebirth as an evangelist called Zekeial.

Zekeial amasses a great following, Chick shows back up, repentant but weak, the two get married and Zeke takes a job at a mill, only Chick cheats on him with her old lover and former con partner Hot Shot (William Fountaine ). The adulterers try to run off together, Zeke's pursues, a carriage accident causing Chick to die but not before she apologizes to Zeke for not staying true. Zeke then kills Hot Shot in revenge, he goes to prison but is eventually let out and returns to his extended family, forgiven once more.

An odd story, with a more morally ambiguous plot then one might expect. Much of the film plays as raciest caricature, though simultaneously this was then an at lest some what progressive picture and a millstone for black film in America. Film critic Daniel Eagen has said that its a film whose "reputation is based largely on the fact that it was made at all" and that seems a real good summation of the thing to me. I don't know how to rate this, not a good movie, but one of historical significance. I'll go with **