Hallelujah
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Movie Reviews of Hallelujah
Movie Review: Truly Hallelujah
Summary: 5 Stars
This was a truly fabulous movie. It was so good to see the cinematic efforts from so far back (1929). The commentary from the movie added to its historical impact. We have made tremenous progress since those days and our stars today should be proud to stand on their shoulders. I would reccommend this to all old cinema buffs.Movie Review: Just Wonderful!
Summary: 5 Stars
This film is age-less. The dance scenes are wonderful. The acting is sharp. You get drawn right into the center of story despite the technical shortcomings of 1929. This is one of my all time Favorites.Movie Review: Classic African-American Film
Summary: 4 Stars
Daniel L. Haynes, the actor portraying the lead character of "Zeke" was a Denzel Washington born ahead of his time. The same is true of the captivating Nina Mae McKinney, a forerunner of say Dorothy Dandridge or Halle Berry. Two powerful screen performances from one of Hollywood's first talkies(1929). Sure the stereotypes are evident, but with story telling that is still relevant for today, especially in our modern society of loose morals and uncontrolled passions.
Zeke's innocent and somewhat gullible character is tempted, after he delivers to town and receives payment for his poor family's cotton farming endeavors, by the allurements of a beautiful young woman(Ms. McKinney), known simply as "Chick." Who flirts with and seduces him into a crooked fixed-dice gambling loss with her accomplice and apparent lover "Hot Shot". All the families hard earned money is squandered away. Seeking revenge, Zeke overpowers the conman's gun and fires it wildly into the bar crowd. Whether by his own rage or from the initial shots fired by his crooked intended target, his younger brother "Spunk" is killed. He returns home to his worried mother and father the next morning, a broken man, with his dead brother lying in the back of the wagon. During a mournful funeral service in which he couldn't find self-forgiveness to enter the church, his forgiving father exits the church and finds Zeke lying prostrate with grief. Looking to the heavens, his father encourages him to look to the deliverer for forgiveness.
Zeke finds "religion" as we flash forward to his extremely popular evangelistic efforts as "the prophet." And while parading through the streets on the back of a donkey, cheered on by hundreds, he is mocked by the same young temptress and Hot Shot. She even heckles him while he's preaching in a later scene, until the conviction of being the only soul left in the audience not to respond to brother Zeke's altar call. She is brought to tears and cries out for bro. Zeke to save her from the devil as well. But as we are taken to the baptism of converts, Ms. McKinney, at her loveliest, adorned in a white robe awaiting her turn to be baptized in the river, is caught up in the spirit of emotion and sinks into the arms of the prophet, who under a hypnotic spell, carries her away into a nearby tent, in full view of the multitude, with not so religious intent. His Godly mother soon follows them inside the tent and pulls her wayward son back to his senses. And at a later church revival, Bro. Zeke again loses all sense of moral judgement, when he spies her in the congregation "caught-up in the Spirit" and steps from the pulpit, into the ecstatic crowd where they meet, as she, under the guise of emotionalism, lures him out the church door and they run away together, hand-in-hand into a life of sin. Zeke's fiance, "Missy Rose" franticly follows them into the woods, searching in vain and crying out: "Don't leave me Zeke!" But their's is not a happy ending; tragic even. I won't spoil the rest of the story.
If for no other reason, a unique addition of historic value to any movie lover's collection. Director King Vidor's first talkie and Hollywood's first major African-American production. Originally released by M-G-M, a very decent transfer to DVD of this nearly 80 year old film.
Movie Review: How much Black nationalism has aged !!!
Summary: 4 Stars
First talky by Vidor with only Black Afro-American actors. The second film of a quadrilogy that intended to reflect the great 1929 depression that was to throw the US into the arms of history, of reformism and social progress that will have to go through WW2 to finally come to a real leap forward that has never been finished nevertheless. The film shows first of all how much the US owed to the Blacks they had imported as enslaved cattle and that were starting to conquer a human position in a deeply unjust society, through the cultural development they brought and invested in US music. The musical side of the film is fascinating especially how all the gospels, blues and other songs are entirely integrated in real life in the very story of the film. They are part and parcel of it all and that shows how music, poetry, religion are one only thing that gets its life from and gives life to the real world. But... The desire to give a picture of the Black world in America as being an entirely self-contained society leads to two regrettable elements. For one the Blacks are not exploited by banks, by white society, by white capitalism. Then they have to contain the causes and reasons of all that is evil in their midst. And we have it all indeed. The main poor character gambles the money of the cotton harvest of his family and loses it to a Black cheater who uses fake dice and is using a woman to bait and trap Zeke into the game. Then Zeke will kill his brother in the ensuing brawl. Then he will become a preacher and will finally marry the woman who had gotten him into the dice game when she pretends to have changed and repented her evil ways. Yet she will try to elope with the gambler. Zeke will chase them, kill his wife and then the man. He will end up in a force labor camp, still with no whites anywhere. He will be paroled and go home to find all his family happy and forgiving. We then understand and have to admit the fable is naïve and even vicious since it exonerates the whites of all their responsibility for the morally and socially deprived Black community they relentlessly exploit, down to their very bones and blood. It may represent the Black nationalist movement of the time (the 1920s) but it shows how artificial and racist in the end this vision can be. Does the music save this tale? Probably not, even if it shows how much the music is embedded and encrusted in both the Blacks and the US.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Movie Review: an early gem from the dawn of sound
Summary: 4 Stars
King Vidor ("The Big Parade", "The Crowd", "Show People") was one of the first major Hollywood studio directors to feature an all-African-American cast in this visually striking film from M-G-M in 1929. Produced in the first full year of sound production, Vidor's film (like Rouben Mamoulian's "Applause" released the same year)manages to avoid the staginess and overcome many of the technical limitations inherent in the early talkies. Forget the stereotype-laden plotline: the lust for a city vamp (Nina Mae McKinney)leads a sharecropper-turned-preacher (Daniel L. Haynes) astray--this film gets 4 stars for its climactic sequence alone: a bravura expressionistic chase through a fog-shrouded swamp that is worthy of Murnau or Lang at their best--definitely worth a look!