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The Five Heartbeats (1991) 15th Anniversary Special Edition

Posted By: Efgrapha
The Five Heartbeats (1991) 15th Anniversary Special Edition

The Five Heartbeats (1991) 15th Anniversary Special Edition
DVD9 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC, 16:9 (720x480) VBR | 02:01:10 | 8.31 Gb
Audio: English AC3 4.0 @ 448 Kbps; AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps (each): French, Spanish | Subs: English, French, Spanish
Genre: Musical Drama, Showbiz Drama

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," played by Robert Townsend (who also co-produced, directed and co-wrote the script with Keenan Ivory Waynans). The film is an amalgam of anecdotes drawn from real-life experiences: the long struggle upward, the first rush of success, the dishonest record-company executives, the hard-nosed but nurturing managers, the sex, the drugs, the isolation and the precipitous downward slide. The film begins and ends in the 1990s, as the middle-aged "Duck" (Townsend) ruminates on the past and makes the best of the present.

Synopsis by Hal Erickson, Allmovie.com

Robert Townsend’s “The Five Heartbeats” takes the notion of a musical biopic one step further than usual. His movie is not only the rags-to-riches story of a group of guys from the neighborhood who become big stars, but also the story of what happens to them next.

Their ultimate destination is not simply stardom, which is fairly easy for them to attain, but maturity and happiness, which are a lot harder.

The Five Heartbeats are a rock singing group, loosely patterned on groups such as the Dells and the Temptations. They start out singing for fun in living rooms and street corners, they perform in local amateur nights, they gain an audience of friends and neighbors, and then they’re spotted by a talent scout who wants two things - to make them stars, and to rip them off.

The broad outlines of this story are familiar from a lot of other showbiz biographies, maybe because this is more or less the way it happens with a lot of performers. What Townsend adds that’s special is the way he sees each of the five group members as an individual with his own problems and destiny. This is not only a biography with music, but also a thoughtful look at the way five young men from a poor but nurturing black neighborhood find success, and deal with it.

The screenplay, by Townsend and Keenen Ivory Wayans, begins some 25 or 30 years ago with a bunch of kids, two of them brothers, who are already very different individuals. There’s Duck, the natural leader (Townsend), who has a cool head for the group’s best interests. Eddie (Michael Wright), the lead singer, who has the biggest talent but also the biggest problems, including drugs. J.T.

(Leon), Duck’s brother, who is a ladies’ man, incapable of set tling down. Dresser (Harry J. Lennix), smooth and flashy. And Choirboy (Tico Wells), whose father is a minister who thinks jazz and rock ‘n’ roll are the work of the devil.

Townsend tells their stories in an interlocking series of episodes that’s confusing at first - the opening 20 minutes or so are hard to follow - and then settles down, as if he’s found his way. I doubt if the movie was shot in chronological order, but it certainly picks up confidence and power as it goes along, until by the end we really care about these guys, especially in a couple of scenes where they have to make decisions for a lifetime.

The big dramatic interest centers around Eddie, who has the real star power in the group, and whose ability to break out of a song and really let go has the fans in the front rows swooning. But Eddie is not simply the star, he’s also the one with the most vulnerable ego, the biggest problems with self-regard, the almost inevitable attraction to drugs. He begins to screw up and miss dates, and eventually the group has to drop him - leading to a painful scene outside a club, where the Heartbeats are getting into their limo as Eddie comes stumbling up like a bum. Eddie’s ultimate fate is the counterpoint for everything else in the movie.

The other characters are all sharply seen, in moments involving family and romance, pregnancies and heartbreaks, redemptions and breakthroughs. There is one obligatory scene showing racial prejudice against the group (they’re touring the South when they’re stopped by racist state troopers), and it seems a little tacked on, as if the only purpose of the Southern trip was to justify the scene; it’s a retread from the much more effective similar scenes in “Bird.” This is Townsend’s first traditional feature film; his directorial debut, some four years ago, was “Hollywood Shuffle,” a series of comic sketches that parodied the cliched ways Hollywood has used black characters in the movies. Most of those sketches were under 10 minutes; this time, at feature length, Townsend shows a real talent, and, not surprisingly, an ability to avoid most cliches, to go for the human truth in his characters.

Review by Roger Ebert

IMDB 7,5/10 from 2 201 users

Wiki

Director: Robert Townsend

Writers: Robert Townsend, Keenen Ivory Wayans

Cast: Robert Townsend, Michael Wright, Leon Robinson, Harry J. Lennix, Tico Wells, Harold Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers, Diahann Carroll

The Five Heartbeats (1991) 15th Anniversary Special Edition

The Five Heartbeats (1991) 15th Anniversary Special Edition

The Five Heartbeats (1991) 15th Anniversary Special Edition

The Five Heartbeats (1991) 15th Anniversary Special Edition

The Five Heartbeats (1991) 15th Anniversary Special Edition

The Five Heartbeats (1991) 15th Anniversary Special Edition

The Five Heartbeats (1991) 15th Anniversary Special Edition

The Five Heartbeats (1991) 15th Anniversary Special Edition

The Five Heartbeats (1991) 15th Anniversary Special Edition

The Five Heartbeats (1991) 15th Anniversary Special Edition

The Five Heartbeats (1991) 15th Anniversary Special Edition

The Five Heartbeats (1991) 15th Anniversary Special Edition


Special Features:

Four featurettes grace the special features menu: Meet the Five Heartbeats (9:40) is an introduction to virtually every character in the movie; In the Studio (4:54) is a visit with the studio singers who provide the Heartbeats' vocals; The Look (5:08) focuses on the costumes and the hairstyles; The Director's Process (10:59) is a whole bunch of airy blather from Robert Townsend, who (not surprisingly) comes pretty close to breaking his own arm with the back-patting.

The Nomination is less than 2 minutes of on-set, in-costume b-roll jibber-jabber.

Under the "Original Publicity Campaign" banner you'll find The Five Heartbeats Original Featurette (4:32), a Robert Townsend Profile (2:24), a trio of TV spots, and the original thatrical trailer.

Material normally known as "deleted scenes" is presented under a Bonus Footage heading. What's interesting about these four scenes is that you can watch them individually – or wedged back into the movie through the magic of semi-seamless branching. What's weird is that these scenes (tallying about 5.5 minutes) consist of raw (and fairly unaudible) footage, which makes one wonder why anyone would want to see them jammed back into the movie.

All thanks to original releaser - vicki

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