1929 All Black Cast Musical Hallelujah starring Nina Mae McKinney original photo archive

[African American Film] Hallelujah was one of the first "talkies" featuring an all-black cast from 1929. Archive of 3 photos and one large advertisement. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1929. Two original vintage silver gelatin photos measure 5" x 7" in glossy black and white. One original vintage silver gelatin photo measures 8" x 10" in glossy sepia toned. Photo advertisement measures 11" x 14" in sepia tones. One of Hollywood's first All-Black Musicals, the film stars Nina Mae McKinney, one of Hollywood's first Black Actresses, in her debut role. The plot chronicles the troubled quest of a sharecropper, and his relationship with the seductive Chick (McKinney). Hallelujah was King Vidor's first sound film and it is one of the earliest Hollywood feature films shot on location in Arkansas. Other members of the cast were non-professional actors, including Harry Gray who worked as a janitor at a newspaper in Harlem, New York. Vidor’s production crew was also racially mixed and included Harold Garrison as an assistant director and black female choral conductor Eva Jessye was the musical director. One photo from the archive features the iconic sequence set in the dance hall, where Nina Mae McKinney performs Irving Berlin’s “Swanee Shuffle.” Although filmed in a New York studio using Black actors, the sequence depicts a black dancehall still echoing with the roots of classic jazz. This was in contrast to most Hollywood films of the period, which tended to sanitize Black music to appeal to appease white viewers. Other images depict McKinney and her co-star Daniel L. Haynes, including at the casino. The large advertisement has two images from the film, one of Haynes working in the field and another of him praying, with text reading: "Negro voices, whether singing or talking, lend themselves with peculiar success to the recording and reproducing mechanism of the sound films. Encouraged by the success of the earlier ventures, one of the screen's most distinguished directors has produced for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer a really beautiful and moving story of the simple black folk of the South..." Many Southern cinema houses were reluctant to show the film, fearing that too many Blacks would attend, and MGM hosted a premiere in Harlem. Archive is in very good condition. (Inventory #: 19877)