No other songwriter made a contribution to the Hollywood musical on the same scale as Irving Berlin (1888-1989), who published his first song in 1907 and retired 55 years later. He worked for all the major studios on films including Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936) and Carefree (1938) for RKO, On the Avenue (1937), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938) and There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954) for 20th Century-Fox, Holiday Inn (1942), Blue Skies (1946) and White Christmas (1954) for Paramount, and This is the Army (1943) for Warner Bros.
Two songs contributed to Hallelujah were Berlin’s first work for MGM. Seven years later, ‘A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody’ was the centrepiece number in The Great Ziegfeld. In 1948 Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’ turned up in Big City.
The same year saw Metro’s first full Irving Berlin feature, when he contributed 17 numbers (reduced to 16 in the final edit) to Easter Parade (or, to give the full title from the film’s opening, Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade).
In 1950 Metro filmed Berlin’s recent Broadway success, Annie Get Your Gun, retaining 11 of the stage version’s 14 songs.
Finally, Easter Parade’s ‘Shakin’ the Blues Away’ was the basis for the only production number in Love Me or Leave Me.
King Vidor directed one of the most iconic sequences in any film musical, when Judy Garland sings ‘Over the Rainbow’ in The Wizard of Oz, though his work on the film was uncredited. Ten years earlier Vidor had made his only other, more extended, contribution to the genre when he devised and directed Hallelujah, Metro’s first all-Black musical.
Daniel J Haynes as Zeke, picking cotton in the opening scene of Hallelujah
Most of the MGM directors who excelled in film musicals–Vincente Minnelli, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, Charles Walters–were inextricably linked to the genre, even if they later or occasionally branched out into other areas. Even Rouben Mamoulian had a background in film and stage musicals before undertaking Summer Holiday. King Vidor is the only director of prestige dramas to have made a substantial contribution to Metro’s musical tradition.
Hallelujah could not, as Ethan Mordden suggests in The Hollywood Musical, have been less like a musical in the Broadway Melody tradition. Set in and around the cotton plantations of the American South, it is a story of sin and redemption, intended by Vidor to say something serious about, and present an accurate picture of, “the Negro race”. Inevitably, stereotypes and racist tropes of the time are not absent from a film written and made by white people, but Hallelujah is generally acknowledged as a sincere effort to show Black characters as people rather than types, especially in their experience of grief and passion (Donald Bogle,Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks, 1984).
It is also, in Rick Altman’s view, the first masterpiece of the folk musical genre, with its focus on togetherness and community (The American Film Musical, 1987). Unlike its predecessor, The Broadway Melody, Vidor’s film presents characters in everyday settings, rather than the showbiz world that lends itself to song and dance; it is an attempt to tell a story through the music of the community represented. Most of the songs are spiritual in nature, less concerned with performance than with the spontaneous expression of religious faith. Song expresses emotions that cannot be enunciated any other way.
A repentant Zeke sings ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’
Vidor’s vision was compromised by the studio’s insistence on incorporating two numbers written by Irving Berlin, to improve the picture’s commercial potential. ‘Waiting at the End of the Road’ is a pseudo-spiritual, sung by Zeke and Spunk when they set off to sell the cotton, and reprised when Zeke preaches. ‘Swanee Shuffle’ is sung by Nina Mae McKinney and is at least appropriate to her character’s character.
Dance is also character-driven in Hallelujah. ‘Dance 1’ is a tap dance performed as a spontaneous outburst of joy by children at a family gathering, while McKinney’s ‘Dance 2’ reveals Chick’s inner nature, as well as performing the narrative function of enticing Zeke.
Much of Hallelujah was filmed on location in Tennessee and Arkansas, giving it a sense of space and fluidity very different from most of its contemporaries. This was achieved by the decision to film the location sequences without sound, and to add the songs and dialogue later, Back in Hollywood. The price of freeing the camera in this way was a torturous six-month post-production period in which an approach to synchronizing sound and image had to be improvised on the hoof.
Bogle is right in calling Hallelujah‘s story akin to “operatic absurdity” and it can never be more than a white humanist’s vision of a culture known only from the outside. It is, nonetheless, one of the first Hollywood masterpieces of the sound era and the first musical film of real substance.
Very little seems to be known about George Cunningham (?1904-?62). He is mentioned as the uncredited creator of the rudimentary choreography in The Broadway Melody, though it has been suggested that some of that work was by Sammy Lee. Both Cunningham and Lee are credited on The Hollywood Revue of 1929.
The trail ends there, though IMDb also cites Cunningham as the director of a few jukebox musical shorts in the 1940s.
Hallelujah was the first film photographed by Gordon Avil (1899-1970), who went on to work with King Vidor again on The Champ (1931). These were the most prestigious projects of his lengthy career, much of which was spent in television from 1955 onwards.
The Boy Wonder Irving Thalberg (1899-1937) was the creative engine room of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from the studio’s creation in 1925 until his early death. In twelve years he supervised over 400 pictures, including virtually all of its prestige productions, without ever choosing to take an on-screen credit.
Thalberg had some level of involvement with most of MGM’s musical output from The Broadway Melody in 1929 until A Day at the Races, on which he was working at the time of his death; it was he who brought the Marx Brothers to Metro, reviving their flagging careers at the cost of comedic purity.
Thalberg effectively launched the musical genre as the driving force behind The Broadway Melody. He showed his inclination for experimentation-within-limits by okaying Hallelujah even though King Vidor warned him it would make no money.
Thalberg brought Grace Moore and Lawrence Tibbet from the Metropolitan Opera and gifted stardom to Jeanette MacDonald. He persuaded Luise Rainer to take the small role in The Great Ziegfeld that won her an Oscar.
Although business-oriented, Thalberg was prepared to devote time and money to producing high-quality work, and he made profits as a result. His impact on the early development of the MGM musical is impossible to quantify, but a philosophy of excellence can certainly be seen in the work that followed, especially in the golden age of the early 1950s.
In 1928 Ransom Rideout (1889-1975) had some success in New York with Goin’ Home, a melodrama about miscegenation in which, regrettably, the central character was played by an actor in blackface.This may or may not have qualified him to contribute dialogue to Hallelujah, which stands as his sole contribution to the cinema.
Richard Schayer (1880-1956) helped to write over 100 films during a forty-year career, and perhaps staked his claim to a place on the lower levels of immortality by co-writing the treatment that became Universal’s The Mummy (1932).
While at MGM, Schayer worked on four of the studio’s early musicals. He wrote the treatment for Hallelujah, developing King Vidor’s basic idea. In the same year he adapted a French play from 1851 into the Roman Novarro swashbuckler Devil-May-Care. He then displayed his versatility by scripting Free and Easy for Buster Keaton and turning a recent Crane Wilbur play into Children of Pleasure.
By 1932, Schayer was a member of the Laemmles’ team at Universal.
Writing the scenario forHallelujah was the only MGM musical credit for Wanda Tuchock (1898-1985), though she did script Youth Will Be Served (1940) for 20th Century-Fox. Tuchock worked in most of the other major genres during her career, and was also one of only three women credited as a Hollywood director during the 1930s (the others being Dorothy Arzner and the less well-known Dorothy Davenport).
King Vidor (1894-1982) was celebrated throughout his career at MGM and later as a maker of ‘prestige’ pictures. This applies to Hallelujah, his only musical and a film celebrated (and criticized) for many things other than its musical performances. Hallelujah stands alongside The Crowd (1928), The Champ (1931), The Citadel (1938) and War and Peace (1956) as a film for which Vidor was nominated for the Best Director Oscar (he never won).
