King Vidor's highly personal, highly willful portrayal of the life of black folks (sin, salvation, and songs in particular) in the Deep South, Vidor's own geographical origin. In some ways it was as bold an experiment in ethnography as the documentaries of Robert Flaherty (and maybe, because so much closer to the Average American Home, even bolder); and it was a trailblazer for such major-studio, all-Negro productions as Green Pastures and Stormy Weather. The passage of the years has seen to it that what was once so progressive has come to seem so primitive: it could only be ahead of its own time, not ahead of all time. With Daniel Haynes and Nina Mae McKinney. (1929) — Duncan Shepherd
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