Thissemi-musical with its all-black cast and its Tennessee and Arkansas locations was a bizarre project for thegenerally high-gloss, studio-confined Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. What let the film proceed was King Vidor'soffer to defer his salary (he was still asking for payment in 1981!), alongside a brief vogue for all-blacktales of the South-on Broadway, Rouben Mamoulian had a hit in Porgy; in Hollywood, Fox put Hearts in Dixiein production. MGM's footdragging about sound-film technology forced Vidor, in 1928, to shoot silentlocation footage of the river baptism and swamp murder, and then painstakingly synchronize dialogue.Around questions of religion, sexuality, and family stability, he molded a tale of a cotton sharecropper whobegins losing everything-his year's earnings, his brother's life, his freedom-by giving in to the temptationsof a dance-hall girl (Nina Mae McKinney, in a forked lightning performance). The passionate conviction ofthe melodrama, vibrant Irving Berlin music, and resourceful technical experiments make Hallelujah thefirst indisputable masterpiece of the sound era. Scott Simmon