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nter the
DIXIES
Casts of a Chocolate Cast Find Opportunity in the Talkies
IF AL JOLSON and his raft of imitators carry out their threats and walk a million miles for one of Mammy's smiles, they'll get there only to be disappointed. Mammy has gone in the movies. So have pappy, Old Black Joe and Old Man River.
With the advent of the talking pictures, a new race has come to the screen.
Practically every studio with a sound stage is experimenting with at least one feature all-Negro picture.
Christie is well into the series of Octavus Roy Cohen's fascinating stories of Florian Slappey. King Vidor has been two months on "Hallelujah," which was elaborately begun in New York, continued in Birmingham and Memphis, and equally elaborately concluded in Culver City. The Fox company has a special called "Hearts of Dixie," dealing with revivals and spirituals; and there are any number of other studios that are holding Negro stories in readiness should these forerunners prove to be the sensation they are expected to be.
The Negro is exceptionally adapted to the sound screen. The humorous drawl, the pungent philosophies, the rich gift of music and of dance make this race a boon to the singies and talkies. Whether this is merely an experimental epidemic or the start of a new feature of the screen remains to be seen.
The answer lies with the public, a public that has not heretofore been too tolerent of the talents of the black man.
By DOROTHY MANNERS
Perhaps the
In the last ten years the art of the Negro has found considerable recognition in New York, Paris and other cosmopolitan centers. Literature has its "Weary Blues," music its Roland Hays, the musical comedy stage its late Paul Robson and the theater its "Emperor Jones." But the screen plays to the audience of the world, in a sense' less broadened, less tolerant. What the movies hold for this vivid race is sealed in the future.
In the meantime Hollywood is abounding in Negro talent recruited from the South, from Harlem, from the stage.
most important of these new Negro pictures is King Vidor's "Hallelujah" and the most important of the players, Daniel Haynes, who enacts the leading role of Zeke. The troupe had been back in Hollywood but a week when I wandered onto the set at M.G.M. to watch a few of the scenes from the gambling sequence. Negroes of all types and varying shades of chocolate-brown were clustered about the card tables, gambling, crap-shooting, losing, winning, calling drawly greetings to one another, shuffling nervous dancing feet between scenes as well as when they were required to "be themselves" before the grinding cameras. {Continued on page 88)
Negroes have found the movies easier picking than cotton. And, as they say, more emolumental. At tlie left are Daniel Haynes as Zeke in " Hallelujah"; and Roberta Hyson as Sappho Dill in "The Melancholy Dame"
^V.
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