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 films with an all-African American cast produced by a major studio. Although frequently touted as Hollywood's first all-black cast musical, that distinction more properly belongs to Hearts in Dixie , which premiered several months earlier.
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.
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, while moving the arms like a piston on a locomotive wheel.
Hallelujah entered the public domain on January 1, 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".
