1929 Movie “Hallelujah”
HUNDREDS OF PLANTATION HANDS were gathered on the bank of a Southern river to take part in a scene of exhortation and baptism. Converts in white robes were marshaled in long lines to wait for the ecstatic privilege of wading out into midstream one by one, and receiving the baptismal rite. Meanwhile the evangelist, a prepossessing young negro with a resonant voice, appealed for more repentant sinners to approach the mercy seat. From his little platform he hurled exhortation and warning at the sea of dark faces before him, and suddenly an electrical response swept over them. Devout ejaculations burst from their lips, their bodies swayed in emotional sympathy, and their arms were tossed skyward.Â
The whole-hearted spontaneity of their response brought a look of keen delight to the face of a white man who brooded in the background with a megaphone in his hand. For these “colored folks” of town and country had been hired as movie extras, the young evangelist was the leading man of an Afro-American screen talkie, and the brooding white man with the megaphone was King Vidor, who won his spurs as a director when he launched “The Big Parade.” It was he who had assembled this multitudinous scene on the river-bank, and the crown of its success was that the quick emotions of the extras had caught fire from the extemporaneous sermonizing of the leading man—who had actually been an evangelist in his time— and were giving the busy cameras far richer food than Mr. Vidor had dared to hope. And now the full-fledged result of that impromptu revival, and of many other unusual scenes of rehearsal and camera work, are given to the world in “Hallelujah,” a movie which has aroused intense public interest, and given rise to much discussion.
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