Hallelujah is a 1929 American pre-Code Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical directed by King Vidor, and starring Daniel L. Haynes and Nina Mae McKinney.

(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.

In 2008, Hallelujah was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

[5] 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.

"[9] Vidor was able to convince Nicholas Schenck, who was the president of MGM at the time, to get the movie made by framing it more as a film that depicted African American’s sexual deviance.

Months later, Zeke has started a new life; he is working at a sawmill and is married to Chick, who is secretly cheating on him with her old flame, Hot Shot (William Fountaine).

Similarly, an outdoor group of workers near the beginning of the film are singing a choral arrangement of "Way Down Upon the Swanee River" (written by Stephen Foster, who never visited the South).

"[9] A sequence which is of vital importance in the history of classic jazz is in the dancehall, where Nina Mae McKinney performs Irving Berlin's "Swanee Shuffle."

Given the equipment available at the time, the film's soundtrack was a technical achievement, employing a much wider range of editing and mixing techniques than was generally used in "talkies" in this period.

In The New York Times, Mordaunt Hall wrote: "in portraying the peculiarly typical religious hysteria of the darkies and their gullibility, Mr. Vidor atones for any sloth in preceding scenes.

"[13] Hallelujah was one of the early projects that gave African Americans significant roles in a movie, and though some contemporary film historians and archivists have said that it had "a freshness and truth that was not attained again for thirty years", a number of contemporary film historians and archivists agree that Hallelujah exhibits Vidor’s paternalistic view of rural blacks that included racial stereotyping.

Vidor biographer John Baxter reports “a now-disconcerting [white] paternalism” that pervades Hallelujah, while film scholars Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell argue that “the film was as progressive as one could expect in the day.” Film critics Kerryn Sherrod and Jeff Stafford agree that “seen today, Hallelujah invites criticism for its stereotypes; blacks are depicted as either naive idealists or individuals ruled by their emotions.” Media critic Beretta Smith-Shomade considers Vidor’s Hallelujah a template for racist and degrading portrayals of "Negras" in the movie industry in subsequent years.

Museum of Modern Arts film archivist Charles Silver made this appraisal: "On one level, Hallelujah clearly reinforces the stereotypes of Blacks as childishly simple, lecherously promiscuous, fanatically superstitious, and shiftless [yet] Vidor could never be accused of the overt racial venom exhibited by Griffith in The Birth of a Nation...Is there, then, a defense for Hallelujah beyond its aesthetic importance?

"[26]Source:[23] Critic Donald Bogle identifies McKinney as the silver screens' “first black whore”, with respect to the role Vidor had fashioned for her in Hallelujah.

[27][28][29] Nina Mae McKinney, coming from the recent stage production of Blackbirds of 1928 portrayed Chick, the object of Zeke’s desire and victim in the films’ tragic denouement.

Theater critic Richard Watts Jr., a contemporary of McKinney, described her as “one of the most beautiful women of our time” She was dubbed “the Black Garbo” when touring Europe in the 1930s.

Many of these films appeared in the silent era with narratives deploring the "plight of women who have fallen on hard times due to unemployment, unwanted pregnancies, divorce, childhood deprivation or simply because they have been ‘born on the wrong side of the track'."

"[33] The formula that Vidor used for McKinney’s Chick was modeled after conventional scenarios depicting white prostitutes in these earlier films: narratives that were already in decline.

Otherwise she may survive and save her soul through an act of redemption; frequently she is paired off with a good man whose upright character serves to cancel out the poor impression of the male sex given earlier in the film…for others, death awaits.

[35][36] While acknowledging Hallelujah's racial stereotyping, critics Kerryn Sherrod and Jeff Stafford report that "the film set a high standard for all subsequent all-black musicals and still stands as an excellent showcase for the talents of Ms. McKinney and company.