The Five Heartbeats

Loosely based on the life and times of several R&B artists (The Dells, The Temptations, Frankie Lymon, Sam Cooke and others) The Five Heartbeats traces the rise and fall of a popular African-American 1950s singing aggregation. The story is told from the point of view of one of the "Heartbeats," ...more

When filming the big-screen adaptation of Dreamgirls (2006), Bill Condon undoubtedly used the Broadway staging of that musical as his template. But he could very well have been using The Five Heartbeats. In fact, Robert Townsend's 1991 labor-of-love, considerably less heralded than Condon's film, is a truer and more fulfilling "making of a Motown supergroup" movie. The films have so many surface similarities -- the tentative rise in the ranks, the windy road to success, the inevitable ...more