Hallelujah!

A landmark for both its innovative use of sound and as the first film by a major studio to star a cast of all black performers, King Vidor's early talkie melodrama concerns a sharecropper (Haynes) ruined by a shiftless woman (McKinney, one of the first black movie stars, in her debut). Though it reflects many of the racial stereotypes of the time, Hallelujah stands as Hollywood's first attempt to sympathetically depict the black experience.