REVIEWS
68 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
Reviewed by Chris Hall
Like any official documentary, Hitsville: The
Making of Motown, which celebrates 60 years of
the iconic record label, is largely about protecting
the brand, and there’s a lot of gloss here. Ignoring
the lawsuits, addiction and fraught relationships,
the film focuses predominantly on the sixties
and firmly on the artists, the music and the
context of America’s racial tensions and civil-
rights movement (and also many of the unsung
talents behind the scenes). But, interestingly,
it pays a lot less attention to Diana Ross – with
whom Motown founder Berry Gordy had an
affair and a daughter – than Motown 40: The
Music Is Forever did 20 years ago. In fact, Ross
wasn’t even interviewed for this film. The vast
majority of Hitsville, which is directed by Gabe
and Benjamin Turner, is anchored by Gordy
and his friend and colleague Smokey Robinson,
and one of the many joys here is the genuine
warmth, chemistry and respect between them. A
big plus is the use of previously unseen footage
from Motown’s archives and Gordy’s personal
collection (he is executive producer too).
There are plenty of famous record labels
associated with a particular city (Chess Records,
Sun Records, Factory) but none has quite the same
intimate relationship as that between Motown
and Detroit, where the migration of black
workers from the South to the city’s car plants
laid the foundations of its success. Gordy himself
was working on the Ford assembly line when he
had the revelation: “I can do this with people.”
Although, as Hitsville shows, up to a point, Lord
Copper. Many of the artists Gordy helped to
shape and form within a fiercely competitive
if supposedly family environment ultimately
wanted to be free of his rigid production system,
whose mantra was ‘find, sign, develop’.
The film’s structure is based on a schematic
diagram of a Motown assembly line, which
we keep cutting back to, moving more or less
chronologically from chapters with titles such
Reviewed Pamela Hutchinson
If you had any doubts about the star status of
Jennifer Lopez, they should be dispelled by
one shot in writer-director Lorene Scafaria’s
exhilarating comedy-drama Hustlers. J-Lo is
instantly recognisable, still, even shot from
behind, swaggering down an NYC sidewalk in
a Juicy Couture velour hoodie and skin-tight
Koral leggings, a late-noughties throwback
with an appealingly light-hearted bounce in
her step. It would make a fine opening shot
for a movie, but in fact this arrives on the
downswing in Scafaria’s crime story, based on a
real-life scam reported by New York magazine.
Lopez’s actual entrance, as pole dancer
Ramona, is pure showstopper. She glides on to
the stage of the strip club where our cautious,
exploited heroine Destiny (Constance Wu)
works, dressed in a mere suggestion of Lurex
and rhinestone, and balanced on six-inch heels.
Scafaria smartly sidesteps the male gaze for
the most part, and Ramona’s performance on
the pole, bending, flexing and hanging in mid-
air, is an astonishing feat of athleticism. The
movements of her perfectly tanned and toned
flesh signify elite gymnastics rather than sleazy
titillation – yet instead of handing her a medal,
the clientele rain down an improbable cascade
of dollar bills. Ramona registers Destiny’s open-
mouthed awe with one of the script’s juiciest
one-liners: “Does the money make you horny?”
It certainly does. Hustlers is the story of how
Destiny and Ramona hook up, first as dance
partners and then as thieves-in-arms. Working
at the club is presented as a fairly joyless grind
at the best of times – ie when the Wall Street
clientele stroll in with cash to spare (“2007 was
the fuckin’ best!” sighs Destiny of the night when
an R&B celebrity came to the club). Post-crash,
the tips are leaner and the punters meaner, so
the women form a robber gang – which you
can interpret as a needs-must graft or sweet
sociological revenge, depending on your moral
stance. It’s to this cleverly written film’s credit
that it leaves such ethical questions open, but
definitely not unexplored. Ramona ranks their
customers by income, but uses that as a marker
of their inherent corruption, and she keeps her
own counsel right up to and including the film’s
peach of a final line – as crisp a metaphor for 21st-
century US economics as you could wish for.
as ‘Unlocking Potential’, ‘Artist Development’,
‘Cycle of Success’ and ‘Transcending the
Production Line’. A lot of the shots of talking
heads and recreated scenes are packed with visual
annotations that will probably be missed if you’re
not paying close attention, especially if you don’t
catch a name (they are not repeated in subsequent
shots). This is OK with Smokey Robinson but
less so with head of A&R Mickey Stevenson,
say. Some of the film is somewhat literal where
it really doesn’t need to be – for example, when
Gordy mentions his phone ringing, there’s a... you
guessed it. One rather funny shot is of the tape
rewinding when Gordy and Robinson want to
settle a $100 bet about who first recorded ‘I Heard
It Through the Grapevine’ (Gordy, as ever, wins).
Motown songs changed towards the end of
the 1960s because the world changed, and even
Gordy had to accept this eventually. He thought
‘Cloud Nine’, the ‘psychedelic’ Temptations song
released in 1969, was about drugs (of course
it was!) and wanted nothing to do with it, and
he told Marvin Gaye that ‘What’s Going On?’
was just too political. Gaye’s masterpiece is one
of the songs that Hitsville really lets breathe
as the layers of his voice, conga drums and so
on are slowly added. There’s also a brilliant
dissection of how ‘My Girl’ was written.
It’s hard not to simply marvel at the quality of
the music from that time (the film doesn’t really
go into the move from ‘Hitsville USA‘ in Detroit,
now a museum, to LA in the early 1970s): the
genius of Stevie Wonder even at 11 years old, the
brilliance of the house band The Funk Brothers,
The Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, The
Temptations. And then there’s Michael Jackson’s
jaw-dropping audition with The Jackson 5 in
1968 and his cover of Smokey Robinson’s ‘Who’s
Lovin’ You’, a poignant reminder of some of the
darkness that was to form part of the Motown
story, but which is largely absent here.
Hitsville: The Making of Motown
United Kingdom/USA 2019
Directors: Benjamin Turner, Gabe Turner
Hustlers
USA 2019
Director: Lorene Scafaria
Certificate 15 109m 36s
A documentary celebrating 60 years since the
founding of Motown in Detroit, Michigan, including
interviews from the artists and behind-the-scenes
staff who contributed to its rise as one of the
biggest and most influential record labels of all
time. Rare footage and audio recordings from
the 1950s to the 1970s are intercut with present-
day and archive interviews with Motown legends
such as Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Martha
Reeves, Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin, who
discuss the label’s formation and legacy amid
the backdrop of the civil-rights movement.
Producer
Leo Pearlman
Director of
Photography
Charlie Wupperman
Editor
Paul Monaghan
Original Music
Ian Arber
Supervising
Sound Editor
Richard Kondal
©Motown the
Film Limited
Production
Companies
Showtown presents
in association
with Polygram
Entertainment,
Capitol Records
and Motown
A Fulwell 73
production
Executive
Producers
Berry Gordy
Steve Barnett
Martin Bandier
David Blackman
Ethiopia
Habtemariam
Michelle Jubelierer
Vini Malhotra
In Colour and
Black & White
[1.78:1]
Distributor
Altitude Film
Entertainment
Back to Detroit: Smokey Robinson
Ploymates: Constance Wu, Jennifer Lopez
Credits and Synopsis
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Reviews, 11
