Vidors’s Hallelujah!

While justly criticized for the one-note and paternalistic view of African Americans, King Vidor’s Hallelujah! remains important for a number of excellent reasons. It is the first sound film with an all-Black cast. Vidor’s background in documentary films led him to emphasize realistic aspects of industry and life. The film showcased a number of Black professionals, and the beautifully photographed almost iconic story of faith challenged by human frailties is universal.

King Wallis Vidor was born in Galveston, Texas on February 8, 1894. He stated that his desire to make the film stemmed from the respect for others he gained after having spent much of his youth among Black families in the South. He began his film career doing short newsreel documentary footage and his reputation was built on films about the human struggle against nature and destiny such as The Big Parade (WWI) and The Crowd (the anonymity of city life) where a lone individual is lost against the backdrop of circumstances beyond his control. He was in Paris when he heard about the first sound film and rushed home from Europe to promote the idea for this film.

His stylistic choice was to eliminate any interaction with Whites and focus on one poor rural family, its neighbors, religion, and the wider world of Black districts and businesses. He was determined to be as realistic as possible about conditions and traditions so he arranged to shoot as much as possible on location around Memphis, Tennessee and in Arkansas, and altered his script according to what he heard from Black experts in different areas. His film offered almost a documentary view of a cotton gin and the baling and shipping process. Four Black ministers challenged his planned presentation of a river baptism and he changed his script to meet their specifications. One of the biggest problems he faced with location shots, however, was that the cameras were very large and noisy. The size of the camera combined with the soundproofing made it almost impossible to move once a scene had started. He compensated for his difficulties, by carefully framing his shots as large open-air stages and by adding most of the sound after the shooting was complete. Considering that most members of his large cast had never acted in a film before, their achievement and his was in itself a remarkable act of faith and professionalism.

Though Vidor’s script described a very poorly educated family and impulse-driven behavior, his cast was drawn from a wide range of Black professionals working in New York and Chicago among other urban areas. Daniel Haynes, who played the lead character Zeke, had a degree from Morris Brown College in Atlanta and had studied at the University of Chicago before working as an understudy in Showboat. The eighty-six-year-old Harry Gray, who played his Father, was working at the Amsterdam News in New York prior to being offered the job. Zeke’s psalm-singing, ever faithful and retiring stepsister Missy Rose was played by a blues singer named Victoria Spivey. Eva Jessye was a college trained musician and her group called the Dixie Jubilee Singers was chosen because Vidor needed professionals who could match the demands of his production.

The most incredible cast member of all, however, was the luminous Nina Mae McKinney. Though only sixteen years old at the time, she had been on the stage in New York for several years before Vidor called her out of a production to star in his film. Her magnificent performance was worthy of the best-trained actors of the time and was praised by nearly every reviewer writing about the film. Later, when she spent time working as a singer and dancer in Europe, she was dubbed the Black Garbo. If she had been White, there was little doubt that she would have earned an academy award nomination for the emotional range of her performance. As it was, the level of racism at the time meant that she got very few chances to exhibit her skill in mainstream films. Vidor’s film remains the best proof of her extraordinary talent in that venue.

When considered in the light of the cumbersome camera work, Vidor’s well-meaning but very paternalistic and demeaning script, the large number of cast members who had never acted before, and the need to dub all the voices after the film was complete, the powerful visuals and effective narrative presentation are little short of incredible. As with Vidor’s earlier successes, I think the film works because Zeke is still an everyman for the whole American audience.  Vidor’s story about human frailty nearly tearing a family apart is not very different from that of Murnau’s Sunrise in 1927, where a devious woman nearly convinces a husband to kill his loyal wife.

Zeke, as a man of faith, is honest in that calling and his honesty is what draws the crowd to renew their own beliefs. When he falls, it is not in arrogant dismissal of faith, but in helpless devotion to the girl he loves. Chick is not so much evil, as lost, with no clear understanding of her place in life. The struggle in this film is with the fragility of human nature itself and the strong worldly pressure to misread the weakness of giving in as strength, independence, and wisdom. In this context, it is as old and as universal a story as that of Adam and Eve cast out of Paradise, the original Ezekiel’s plea for faith, or of Jesus forgiving the thieves beside him on the cross at Golgotha.