NFR PRoject: The problems of 'Hallelujah!' (1929)

 

Hallelujah!

Dir: King Vidor

Scr: King Vidor, Wanda Tuchock, Richard Schayer, Ransom Rideout

Pho: Gordon Avil

Ed: Hugh Wynn, Anton Stevenson

Premiere: August 20, 1929

100 min.

To call this film problematic is an understatement.

It represents a dark era in American history (some would say things are not much better). What makes it doubly painful is that it was made with the best intentions.

King Vidor, who originated the project as his first sound film (after his successes with The Big Parade and The Crowd), actually deferred his salary to get the green light for the movie. It was a celebrated cause. It was one of the very first all-Black-cast Hollywood films. Vidor wanted to show “the Southern Negro as he is.”

The film is irredeemably racist, and states many of the misconceptions that plague the depiction of Black people in film in mainstream media. The mature works of pioneer Black filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux were not seen outside of Black theaters at the time. There were regionally created “race” films, as there were “race” records. This film wasn’t shown south of the Mason-Dixon Line, presumably because the theater owners deemed it subversive as it depicted Black people as humans, with feelings.

So it played where it could, and was perceived as being what we would term today “woke.” Looking at it nearly 100 years later, the sense of paternalism it unwittingly displays is easy to perceive and make objection to. Black people are herein depicted as all dialect-slinging, hymn-singing, crap-shooting, eye-rolling slaves of their desires, on fire spiritually, quick to anger and prone to mayhem. The women are all earth mothers, or innocent ingenues, or sultry vixens. The men are affably foolish or sharp-dressed and evil. There are no complex characterizations here. Everyone is playing a sho’ nuff type.

The universe of the film is entirely Black; no white man protrudes upon the scene. God knows how they would have been portrayed – as ineffably superior perhaps? Here all the inhabitants are childish sharecroppers who grow cotton, and a man who goes through several identities on his way to the movie’s end.

Farmer Zeke (Daniel L. Haynes) loses his season’s profits at the gin joint, where Chick (Nina Mae McKinney) rules the dance floor and entices him to gamble. He gets in scuffle with her confederate, the villainous gambler Hot Shot (William Fountaine), and his brother is shot down. He gets religion, and become a traveling, showboating preacher.

He delivers a sermon that drives the populace into a frenzy, including the evil Chick. She seduces him and away they run, settling down with him working in a lumber mill. Hot Shot returns, plans a getaway with an eager Chick, and both are pursued by Zeke. Their carriage overturns and Chick is killed. Zeke then tracks Hot Shot through the swamp and strangles him to death.

We are shown Zeke doing his time in prison, but seemingly soon he is singing away on top of a freight car (did we mention this was kind of a musical?), on his way home. He finds everyone just as they were when he left, and he gratefully rejoins them.

You see? It’s literally hopeless. Everybody’s either redeemed or a sinner. The guy returns to his miserable beginnings, Candide-like, chastened after his adventures. It posits submission to fate and obedience as Christlike virtues.

It’s also a classic case of Hollywood screwing something “real” up. Most Hollywood takes on mundane reality distorted, and continue to distort, it. We want to hear when something is “based on a true story,” and we will put up with all manner of absurdities for that sake. Hallelujah! is an exercise in ignorant anthropology. In mainstream cinema, the act of observing alters the thing observed.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Lambchops.