Very little seems to be on record about Anton Stevenson (1906-80) other than that he was born, lived for seventy-four years, and worked on the editing of two films while in his twenties.
One of the films was Hallelujah.
Category: Hallelujah
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Hugh Wynn
Hugh Wynn (1897-1936) was a respected MGM editor whose career was cut short by his tragically early and sudden death.
Wynn’s most prestigious assignment was The Big Parade (1925), after which he worked regularly with King Vidor, including on Hallelujah.
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Ward Bond
Few actors appeared in more of Hollywood’s greatest films than Wardell Edwin Bond (1903-60), outstanding supporting player and notorious conservative antisemite. This was, in great part, owing to his membership of the John Ford Stock Company.
Ford met Bond when he was still a member of the University of Southern California football team, casting him in Salute (1929). In the same year, Bond featured in So This Is College as…a USC footballer. It was his only Metro musical appearance.
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Madame Sul-Te-Wan
Nellie Crawford (1873-1959) was enrolled into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame under the much more exotic stage name she began using at some point in the late 20s or early 30s. Donald Bogle has suggested that she chose the unusual name because it enabled her to seek work as Asian as well as Black characters. Sul-Te-Wan was the first Black actor to secure a Hollywood contract when D W Griffith hired her at $25 a week for The Birth of a Nation (1916).
Like Clarence Muse and others, Sul-Te-Wan was a talented actor restricted by Hollywood racism, but she achieved significant praise for her appearance as Tituba in Maid of Salem, Paramount’s story of the Salem witch trials.
Sul-Te-Wan’s MGM musicals were Hallelujah, San Francisco and Broadway Rhythm, all in uncredited parts.
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Sam McDaniel
Samuel Rufus McDaniel (1886-1962) started his show business career singing with his three sisters, including the subsequently renowned Hattie. Like most Black actors, his Hollywood career was largely limited to servants and railway porters, though he was notable as Doc (a cook) in Captains Courageous (1937), even if his name was misspelt in the credits.
McDaniel’s MGM musical appearances were Hallelujah, Going Hollywood, Music for Millions and Living in a Big Way.
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Clarence Muse
Clarence Muse (1879-1969) was limited in his roles by Hollywood’s institutional racism, but was an actor of great ability. He is a member of the Black Filmmakers’ Hall of Fame.
In the 1920s Muse acted on the New York stage as part of the Harlem Renaissance. In Hollywood, he appeared in the first all-Black musical, Fox Hearts of Dixie (1929), followed immediately by an uncredited appearance in the second all-Black musical, Hallelujah.
Muse’s was not a musical career, although he was a talented singer and composer.
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Eva Jessye
Eva Jessye (1895-1992) was an internationally-renowned choral conductor and composer and a member of the Harlem Renaissance. Later in life, she was part of the civil rights movement.
Cinema played a very small part in Jessye’s prestigious life and career. She made only three films, but one was an MGM musical, she was the choral director and sang in Hallelujah.
In the 1960s Jessye acted in Black Like Me (1964) and Slaves (1969), two well-intentioned anti-racist films.
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Henrietta Frazer
Henrietta Frazer (1889-1966, née Henriette Gant) is not one of the big names of costume design. The only reference to her in Dressed A Century of Hollywood Costume Design is for helping Marion Davies spend $52,000 a year on clothes for her pictures.
It is a reasonable assumption that Frazer designed Davies’s military-style costume for The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Her other musical credits are for Hallelujah and So This Is College.
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Irving Berlin
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.
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Hallelujah (1929)
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.
