The Green Pastures is a 1936 American film depicting stories from the Bible as visualized by black characters.

It starred Rex Ingram (in several roles, including "De Lawd"), Oscar Polk, and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson.

It was based on the 1928 novel Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun by Roark Bradford and the 1930 Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name by Marc Connelly.

[3] An elderly black man reads from the Book of Genesis to a group of six young children in his house.

But the firmament is wet so he creates drainage and mountains to let the water gather in rivers and seas.

In heaven Jehovah decides to visit earth again and finds a sassy young woman playing music and chastises her for doing this on a Sunday.

The scene skips forward to the court of Babylon where the debauchery and sin of the world has consumed Israel.

A prophet of the Lord is pulled in off the street, mistaken for the head Priest of Israel but he is shot at the order of the King of Babylon.

The Priest of Israel asks for forgiveness for the violence but God turns his back upon his chosen people for many years.

On its opening day at New York's Radio City Music Hall, tickets sold at a rate of 6,000 per hour.

Writing for The Spectator in 1936, Graham Greene gave the film a generally good review, speculating that audiences "will find [it] continuously entertaining, if only intermittently moving".

Greene praised director Connelly in particular, describing scenes of "excellent" melodrama, his "ingenious [use of] pathos", and the "admirable" restraint evident in the simplicity of the settings.

Greene's only complaints about the film was that "one may feel uneasy at Mr. Connelly's humour" and his depiction of "the negro mind".

[4] A review in The New York Times under the byline of "B.R.C.," begins with "That disturbance in and around the Music Hall yesterday was the noise of shuffling queues in Sixth Avenue and the sound of motion-picture critics dancing in the street.

The occasion was the coming at last to the screen of Marc Connelly's naïve, ludicrous, sublime and heartbreaking masterpiece of American folk" and praised the sincerity of the production's religiosity and the aplomb of its cast, seeing in the movie "not only the 'divine comedy of the modern theatre' but something of the faith that moves mountains".