Daniel L. Haynes

King Vidor's first sound film and one of the first studio features with an all-Black cast. Vidor, who had spent three years persuading MGM to back it, deferred his own salary to get the picture made. The story follows Zeke, a sharecropper who finds God, falls for the seductive Chloe, and is pulled between the pulpit and the cotton field. Shot partly on location in the South and the Mississippi Delta with a non-professional cast drawn from the communities it depicts, the film blends gospel music, melodrama, and location photography in a way no Hollywood film had before. Nina Mae McKinney, in her screen debut, became known as "the Black Garbo." The film's portrayals draw heavily on the stereotypes of their time, and it remains a complicated, landmark work in the history of American cinema. Published in 1929, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2025.

Drama · Musical

Preston Foster plays "Killer" Mears, a condemned man leading a death-row breakout in this adaptation of the Broadway prison play that made stars of its stage leads. The escape attempt goes wrong in stages — a hostage guard, a machine gun turned on the tier — and the film's final act is essentially one long, escalating riot. An early talkie prison drama from Sono Art-World Wide that set the template for every death-row picture that followed. The film is in the public domain.

Crime · Drama