King Vidor's first sound film is a landmark both in his career and in film history. Using an all black cast--none of whom had ever acted in motion pictures before--Vidor created this visually stunning "symphony" of a Tennessee family. The magnificent scenes of the river baptism and the "shouting" testify to the fact the King Vidor understood the new medium of sound to mean far more than words. Hallelujah is a document of a bygone era, but one in that conveys a strangely immediate sense of life. Hallelujah was long suppressed as a racist portrait of black culture in the rural South, a dubious assertion in view of the commonplace racist caricatures of blacks in hundreds of '20s and '30s features. Vidor's sincerity and affection for his subject are self-evident; he can be accused of paternalism, but his racism is that of the well-meaning liberal. In 1928, such naivete stood in marked contrast to the views of other directors to whom black faces meant sight gags and instant laughter. However, as cinema, Hallelujah needs no apologies; it was the first masterpiece of the sound era.