Hallelujah

Certainly the film [Hallelujah] affirms the value of the family, the land, the rural community and (at least in its emphasis on diligence, frugality, hard work, and family individualism) the puritan ethic, mediated through an Afro ethnicity.
Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon, King Vidor, American (University of California Press, 1988).

King Vidor's 1929 film has a special significance for me:  of movies that I walked out on when I first started seeing movies it has one of the most powerful endings, as Zeke stalks and kills Hot Shot in the primordial swamp.  It is a difficult film for modern audiences, made in the very early days of sound with an all-black and mostly amateur cast, but moving and rewarding if one gives it a chance.  The conflicts are common ones in Vidor's films:  city versus country, the family versus the individual, sex versus religion.  Vidor had a long career, from 1918 to 1959, and is largely unknown today, in spite of having made wonderful silent films (The Crowd, The Big Parade), deliriously beautiful sound films (Duel in the Sun, Ruby Gentry) and everything from superior soap operas (Stella Dallas) to complex epics (War and Peace).  Vidor perhaps had too many interests and passions and didn't emphasize a consistent theme that reviewers could pounce on.  Like many great directors who started in the silent era (see my posts on Allan Dwan) he knew how to convey things visually and this served him well with Hallelujah, with themes conveyed visually or musically or both, from Nina Mae McKinney's dancing to the baptisms in the river.  Zeke (played by Daniel L. Haynes) starts out as a sharecropper, loses his money in a crap game when he falls for Chick (McKinney), becomes a preacher when his brother is killed (and brought home in a wagon, shown in a powerful foreshortened shot, with worn-out shoes), falls for McKinney again, kills her lover Hot Shot (William E. Fountaine) when she tries to run off with him, goes to prison and eventually is released to join his family and marry his childhood sweetheart.  This is all accompanied by spirituals and Irving Berlin's "Waiting at the End of the Road."   The dialogue is mostly post-synchronized but the joys and frustrations of family and religious life are shown in all their complexity.