Yet while Chick is broadly drawn, McKinney fills her with intensities of feeling. This is partly because of the era’s pantomime-influenced style of screen acting, though the hyperbole may also reflect a white director’s ideas about Black humanity. Like the other performances, her delivery can seem overstated, with needlessly exaggerated, near-hieroglyphic poses and gestures.
Visions of glory cd how to#
This was McKinney’s film debut but she already knew how to move onscreen (a lost art), and how to take up space and hold it tight.
![visions of glory cd visions of glory cd](https://f4.bcbits.com/img/0025336377_10.jpg)
McKinney has second billing and fewer lines than Haynes does, but the vibrancy of her presence and the importance of her Jezebel role make her part seem far larger than it is.
Visions of glory cd series#
Like countless male rubes before and after him, Zeke falls for Chick and he keeps on falling, plummeting into a series of crises as he’s ceaselessly torn between the temptations of the flesh (a.k.a. There, he sees Chick (McKinney), a shimmying, shimmering beauty in a flirty, satiny dress who’s entertaining a crowd of rambunctious men. The story kicks in when, after selling the family’s cotton crop, Zeke wanders into a classic den of iniquity. Haynes), the eldest son in a family of poor Southern tenant farmers. “She was beautiful and talented and glowing with personality.”Ī curio that’s by turns fascinating, engaging and wincingly clichéd, “Hallelujah!” tells the story of Zeke (a magnetic Daniel L. She “was third from the right in the chorus,” Vidor wrote in his autobiography. She received more formal training, McKinney said, when she was cast in the chorus for a Broadway revue titled “Blackbirds of 1928.” It was apparently during that show’s run that the director King Vidor, under contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, first saw McKinney. There, as she explained in a Pittsburgh Courier interview, she went to the movies and played dress-up back home, teaching herself to dance by watching others. She was born in South Carolina in 1912 (some sources say 1913), moving to New York about a dozen years later. Yet even at their creakiest and cringiest, they offer irresistible visions of McKinney (who died in 1967) and why she is remembered as among Hollywood’s first Black stars. Also on tap are two short films, an excerpt and three additional features - some grating, others charming and almost all of greater historic than aesthetic interest.
![visions of glory cd visions of glory cd](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2rODDR8y61A/maxresdefault.jpg)
The series showcases “Hallelujah!,” her greatest triumph, which is being presented in a new 35-millimeter restoration. The story of McKinney - her rapid, exciting rise to American celebrity and her slow, steady fade-out - can be tracked in the downward arc of her filmography that’s evident in the partial retrospective that begins Wednesday at Film Forum. She was a ready-made star, but she was also a Black woman in Jim Crow Hollywood, when the industry wasn’t yet soft-pedaling its racism. Mostly, she had that ineffable something - magnetism, oomph - that electrified the screen, making two dimensions seem like three. She had huge eyes, a husky laugh, voluptuous curves. She sang and danced with verve, and the camera adored her. Plucked from obscurity, she shook up the screen in “Hallelujah!,” an all-Black Hollywood musical. In 1929, just as moving pictures were learning to talk, a vivacious teenager named Nina Mae McKinney helped make them sing.