Released during the Great Depression, Hallelujah, I’m a Bum was an attempt by United Artists to reintroduce early talkie singer Al Jolson after his three-year hiatus from the screen.
Based on a Ben Hecht story, with a score by Rodgers and Hart featuring innovative “rhythmic dialogue” delivered in song-song, its sentimental and romantic theme of a New York City tramp met with indifference by moviegoers.
Historian George Millichap observed that “the problem of this entertainment fantasy was that it brushed aside just enough reality to confuse its audience. Americans in the winter of 1933 were not in the mood to be advised that the life of a hobo was the road to true happiness, especially by a star earning $25,000 a week.”
Milestone’s miscalculated effort to make “socially conscious” musical was generally ill-received at its New York opening.
Attempts by Milestone to make a film about the Russian Revolution (working title: Red Square), based on Stalinist Ilya Ehrenburg’s The Life and Death of Nikolai Kourbov (1923), and an adaption of H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933) proposed by Alexander Korda, neither project materialized.
In lieu of these unrealized films, Milestone made three insignificant studio pieces from 1934 to 1936.
