#003: Hallelujah

HALLELUJAH

Release Date

August 20, 1929

History

The third film of the MGM musicals is one that has been a hot potato in recent years. Hallelujah has been the subject of film criticism in many circles for its stereotypical portrayal of Black people and contributing to an early example of the tone for decades of how Black people were expected to be portrayed on film. Hallelujah was directed by King Vidor, who had been working in Hollywood since 1915, and was an established name in the industry. His most famous silent film was The Big Parade. Hallelujah would be Vidor's first sound film, and the subject was one Vidor considered himself very close to, based on his claim that he had encountered Black people at his father's sawmill when he was growing up. He was known for having resentments against Black people because of his claim of reverse racism in his childhood. The result was characters who come across as caricatures. And yet, Vidor had the intention of the film being racially progressive by being the first feature length musical film to feature an all Black cast, and have Nina Mae McKinney being the first Black actress to play a prostitute in a movie, named Chick. Prior to this film, Black prostitute characters were seen, but they were done by White actresses in Blackface. 

Hallelujah is also noted for its technological achievements. Sound could be prerecorded, or it could be recorded live on set, and it was innovative to have a film that blended the two tracks simultaneously together. Remember, there was no magnetic tape at this point-- recording was still being done to disc, and the filmmakers would have needed to mix the two together. With Hallelujah, it's clear that much of the music was prerecorded with people lip syncing. At the same time there were natural sound effects recorded on-site outdoors that are blended in with this. In this sense, the film has followed suit with the first two films of this blog in not being a 'traditional musical', but for a completely different reason.

Hallelujah was originally 109 minutes long, but when the DVD was released, the runtime was 100 minutes, as the digital mastering was done from the shorter rerelease. Today, a new restoration done by Film Foundation and Library of Congress from original WB elements exists of the 109 minute version, but it is still not available on disc or streaming. Therefore, the review that follows is based on this 100 minute version.

Review

Hallelujah is a watchable movie, but compared to today's standards, it was still a little hard to sit through. Beyond the blatant racism that occurs through the portrayals of Black churches, including the actors exaggerated arm waving during the funeral scene, the acting and the script are still very rudimentary for an all-sound feature film. The acting felt like a student film with short phrased dialogue slowly delivered by the performers. Several factors were contributing to this in the first few years of sound. For starters, technology required it as people were still speaking into inferior microphones that went straight to a disc which were then synced to the film (either optically printed or on a separate disc). Second, script writers were very new at what they were doing with this new sound technology and were more used to working in the silent film world. The process of writing dialogue for a sound film and capturing an audience with it had not been perfected yet.

Still, beyond the dialogue and acting, the story and the themes of Hallelujah are what stuck out to me. Zeke lives with his large family on a plantation, and his father is a minister. He goes to town to deliver a haul of cotton, gets swindled by a prostitute named Chick and her gambling boyfriend, Big Shot, witnesses his brother killed in a gunfight as a result, and comes back home remorseful. He becomes a preacher after connecting with God at his brother's funeral, goes back to the same town he was swindled at as part of a church revival he is leading with his family and now fiancée, falls for Chick again, and when she leaves him for Big Shot, Zeke gets into a shootout with him, kills Chick, serves time in jail and ends up coming back to his family, ready to start a new life. 

The themes of family and moral character are well illustrated throughout. The role of family is highlighted from the first scene. The family is singing together, working together, eating together, and also dreaming of what each morsel of cotton they've picked will be spent on if they saved enough. The family is a very close unit. I loved the scenes where they huddle and pray together, illustrating a close bond. When prison reforms Zeke, and he returns to his family, they still embraces him and are ready to provide him with a future. 

Zeke is a complex character. His family is always rooting for this character even though he's clearly a human with faults, as we all are. From the beginning of the film, Zeke is seen trying to kiss Missy Rose, who he loves, a little more than she wants to. His journey into the city before going astray could have been left to a storyline as simple as "Country folk are too simple and innocent for the big city." Instead, the writers added more layer to his character. Zeke starts gambling because others are mocking him for his honest business of cotton selling, when he could be making more money by gambling. He is easily swayed by Chick, and cheats on Missy Rose without any qualms. The row in the bar starts when he realizes he's been cheated out of his money and that he's in trouble. There is guilt when he thinks there is a chance he is responsible for his brother's death.

When he becomes an upstanding preacher, his attempts to fight off Chick are a huge struggle. After she's been saved and tries to touch him inappropriately twice, he has a hard time staying away before he finally gives in. He leaves the preacher life and the family unit to become a logger, and has turned into an absolute monster because of the guilt he has for leaving his fiancée Missy Rose for Chick. The guilt has been eating at him, with a quote that sticks out of him being "tired, tired of thinking." Earlier in the film, he happened to be involved in a shooting that ended with his brother dying, but the audience is not led on to find out how he died. At the end of the film, however, as he has spiraled down, he is now chasing Big Shot and Chick, intending to kill Big Shot, and is responsible for both their deaths. Zeke is obviously a tortured soul, and it takes the prison system to teach him right from wrong, even after his career as a preacher. 

Zeke's preaching scene is very long and reminiscent of the tent revivals that were popular of the time, not only with using heavy vibrato to stress specific words, but holding the attention of the people with showmanship. Today, this scene comes across as a little cultish, but at the time this was a normal part of culture. Zeke does a very cool trick as a train conductor, pretending that he is on a train bound for Hell, and every time he stops, it is a chance for people to get off of the train and be saved. He wears a conductor hat and shuffles his feet to make train sounds, which grabs the crowd. At the evening service, Zeke also puts on his performance hat, as he mimics God as a boxer in a punching match with the sinners of the world, such as bootleggers (an interesting detail knowing the film was made during prohibition).

Zeke's journey of morality is very complex in the film and these layers aren't limited to his character alone. Antagonist Chick is truly evil at the beginning of the film when she hustles Zeke. His brother has died and she hides out with Big Shot, but she is still more concerned about getting her cut of the money, as they are hiding, than anything else going on around her.  Chick at first mocks religion, but as Zeke does his train routine and says it is the 'last stop' before she'll be saved, she finally repents and wants salvation. Still, it is hard to tell if Chick is staging how affected she is by his preaching or if she truly has repented, as she does a very intense performance of a possession of 'the spirit' after her water baptism, flapping and jumping around in the water (at which point she is touching Zeke too much and people are convinced she is lying). She bites Zeke's hand when he is trying to help her, and at the same time fights Big Shot as he tries to stop her from attending Zeke's evening jubilee service. When Zeke does run away with her after a few bouts of inappropriate touching at the jubilee, it is never clear if she had ulterior motives, or if she was just as human as he was and couldn't stay on the 'straight and narrow' after years of hard living. 

Chick's prostitute character illustrates some of the sensational qualities that pre-code cinema was grabbing onto before the Hollywood Code ended all of its fun. There were other moments that stuck out to me as very obviously pre-code. Adam and Eve, neighbors of Zeke and his family, have several children and decide to get married after the fact on a whim. Of course the family makes fun of them, but Zeke's father, being a minister, complies and it's revealed the kidding is all in good fun. They support their family even though it looks different than the traditional Christian family-- not at all normal for a pre-code film. While Broadway Melody showed 1929 clubs breaking the rules of prohibition as glamorous and sophisticated, Hallelujah has an underground jazz club that is very sleazy in nature, and prides itself on this portrayal. Also, Zeke and Chick living together is not at all subtle-- these two are romantically involved, living together in sin, and are not married.

I was entranced by the role cotton played in the film. Cotton is very much its own character in Hallelujah. It's being picked at the beginning, it's being trusted by the family, it's delivery is what makes Zeke go to town, and when Zeke sings his "End of the Road" number, a montage of the cotton being run into a machine and rolled onto the riverboat is the visual to his vocals. Cotton represents good-- it's of the earth, it's pure, it brings in steady cash, and it doesn't have the complexities of human conflict. Also, it was a lucrative industry at the time the film was made.

The technological experimentation in sound is also worth mentioning. As stated before, there is a mix of prerecorded and live recorded singing. For example, when the film starts, the family is picking cotton and singing in the fields. They also sing as they walk back up to the house with their bags filled. These, along with "End of the Road" lend a hand to the concept of singing in musicals being a suspension of belief, as they are clearly professionally recorded and are being lip synced, more to illustrate their emotions than to show actions truly happening on camera. On the other hand, there are instances like the grandmother singing "Hush a Bye" and the wedding dance scene (featuring young Nicholas brothers in a wonderful tap routine) that appear to be recorded on camera, and are more natural to the characters' surroundings. "Swanee Shuffle Along" for example, features background voices and sound effects throughout.

Prerecorded sound doesn't only appear in the song and dance numbers, though. Vidor directed Hallelujah mostly on location at a time when sound film was rudimentary, and the availability of 24 fps cameras scarce. As a result, there are a number of shots filmed with a hand-cranked camera and it is obvious because the film is sped up when projected. Notable examples are Zeke getting off his horse to tell his family about Spunk's death, Missy Rose calling out for Zeke in the woods after he has run away with Chick, and Zeke chasing Big Shot right before he kills him. These are very jarring but it wouldn't be long before shooting an entire feature at 24 fps would become standard, and hand-cranked cameras would be outdated.

Home Video

This DVD of Hallelujah was a decent presentation for a 1929 movie, even if it was the rereleased version. My hope is that with the longer version floating around, it will eventually make its way to streaming, if not also on disc. There was a disclaimer by Warner Bros at the beginning of the film pointing out the film's stereotypes and stating that it didn't reflect on WB's views, and also that the film was being released without any edits. I appreciated this because removing scenes from films because of offensive content is something I am very much against. Films should be released as they were originally made, and if people are upset by their portrayals, it opens up a conversation for remembering how people of a specific demographic were once portrayed in media, and helps us remember that we always have things we can work on to improve. 

The film looked great for its age. There were a handful of moments where replacement footage was spliced into the pristine element, which was more out of focus than the rest of the movie. Splices were minimal, and while there was an appropriate amount of scratches for a 1929 film, by no means did it take me out of the action. The soundtrack, on the other hand, was pretty rough. In some scenes, I couldn't understand the dialogue and had to resort to the DVD's subtitles. It's possible that the acetate discs used for the restoration were not in great shape and contributed to this. I wish these early Warner DVDs had detailed more about their restoration process, the way that Fox did with their demonstrations in the special features. Unfortunately this disc was released long before the Warner Archive Podcast began, which goes into a lot of detail about how a restoration was done for each film the studio releases.

The two special feature shorts were worth noting. One featured Nina Mae McKinney and another featured the Nicholas Brothers, all three are stars in Hallelujah so it was a good choice. The plots are quite lacking as most music shorts from this time were, but hearing some big band music helped get me in the mood for the movie. Also, the Nicholas Brothers' tap dancing is a treat that too many people don't know about and should be more recognized for their contributions to film.