This is such a wonderful, underrated film. Everyone I recommend it to looks at me like I'm crazy until they watch it and become total fans. One of the many delights about the Five Heartbeats is the soundtrack. The songs were written, performed and recorded with such attention to period detail they sound like they really come from the years of the movie. And most of them are great songs anyway. If they had been "real" they would be classics today. A Heart is a House for Love which was actually sung by the Dells, made it to #13 on the R&B charts. Most of the music came from Stanley Clarke, the brilliant bassist and composer. But Thom Bell, one of the originators of TSOP, contributed importantly too, including one of his old songs for the Delfonics. There are so many cool moments in this film. Michael Wright and Hawthorne James offer stand- out performances in a great cast. The Five Heartbeats is easily Robert Townsends best film.

This movie was almost too much like the Committments and That Thing You Do and that wonderful mini series about the Temptations. But is was only "almost". It was wonderful on it's own. Robert Townsend is wonderful. I really came to care about these characters and what was going to happen to them. There was a lot of really good music as well. One wonderful surprise was the singing of the little sister of one of the lead characters. I could not believe her voice! In fact, there was seldom a wrong note. The only reason I didn't give it a 10 is that it was really stretching in places for credibility. However, it was really entertaining overall.

Black performers in the South were treated very badly in the 50s and early to mid 60s. They had to use seperate entrances and often inferior hotels and restaraunts. And the changing of the album cover, the Marvalettes "Please Mr. Postman "album had a cover which featured a cartoon drawing of a mailbox rather than 4 black faces...the movie is accurate in its racial interpretation