While Hearts in Dixie was successful largely because of the novelty of a film with synchronized sound paired with an "all-colored cast," the release of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Hallelujah! in the summer of 1929 brought audiences the same combination in a movie that was heralded by many white film critics as one of the year's ten best pictures. King Vidor, acclaimed as a director of silent films, wrote the story of a cotton sharecropper turned revivalist preacher who is seduced by a woman he converts and baptizes, for his first sound film.

Hallelujah! proved much more controversial than did Hearts in Dixie as African American critics, political leaders, and activists debated both the film's merits as art and its potential impact on the real-life opportunities of black Americans. The debate was fierce as African-American viewers insisted that more than a film was at stake and emphasized the importance of popular culture images in shaping American racial categories. In evaluating both films, black viewers also noted the centrality of portrayals of African-American religion to the stories and kept a watchful eye on the uses of religion in the production of racialized stereotypes.

Hollywood would use religion as the primary setting for the majority of its "all-colored cast films" produced before 1950, including The Green Pastures (1936), the final segment of Tales of Manhattan (1942) and Cabin in the Sky (1943).

Bibliography:

Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.