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-African American 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" [1] and attempted to present a relatively non-stereotyped view of African-American life. It is the first "black musical". Hallelujah was King Vidor's first sound film, and combined sound recorded on location and sound recorded post-production in Hollywood. In , Hallelujah was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.
The film contains two scenes of "trucking": a contemporary dance craze where the participant makes movements backward and forward, but with no actual change of position, whilst moving the arms like a piston on a locomotive wheel. Years before creating Hallelujah , King Vidor had longed to make a film employing an all-African American cast. He had floated the idea around for years but "the studio kept turning the idea down". This was important because he was very enthusiastic about the idea of having an all-African American cast singing "negro spirituals" on the silver screen, after he had seen the success of it on Broadway.
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". The people inhabit a world of racial paternalism where, partly due to religion, the plantation workers are happy with the status quo.
Zeke the plantation boy represents the morally upstanding country boy the good against the morally corrupt due to Hotshot's influence city girl Chick the bad who tempts him from the straight and narrow. They are promptly cheated out of the money by the shill Chick Nina Mae McKinney , in collusion with her gambling-hustler boyfriend, Hot Shot. Spunk is murdered in the ensuing brawl.
