Benjamin Turner and Gabe Turner (2019)
Motown was sixty years old in January 2019. This documentary by the British brothers Benjamin and Gabe Turner is a birthday celebration and the production companies behind it include Motown. You don’t therefore go to Hitsville expecting a searching critical examination of Berry Gordy’s cultural game-changer. The film doesn’t defy expectations but it’s very enjoyable – and genuinely celebratory. Sally and I went to a preview screening at Curzon Richmond, a few days before the UK release date of 4 October. This meant, alas, that Hitsville was prefaced by at least five minutes’ worth of supposedly appetising on-the-red-carpet footage from the film’s European premiere in London. This curtain-raiser included a surprising amount of James Corden, just because (it seemed) he’s a friend of the Turner brothers. It also featured interviews with Smokey Robinson and Gordy, who joked the film should have been called ‘Berry and Smokey’. It isn’t as simple as that but these two, the pioneers-in-chief in the Motown story, are the Turners’ main interviewees in what follows.
They’re an engaging double act. Gordy looks and sounds amazing for a man who’ll be ninety in a few weeks’ time. Robinson (a decade or so younger) is consistently good-humoured and likeable. One exchange between them comes over as an amusing illustration of Gordy’s business acumen. They disagree about who first had a hit with ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’. Gordy says Marvin Gaye; Robinson insists it was Gladys Knight and the Pips. The latter, up-tempo version, which I’d never heard before, is a bit naff: you feel Gordy certainly should be right. Robinson is sure enough, though, to put $100 where his mouth is. Gordy phones a Motown colleague, Brenda Boyce (who also appears briefly in the film) and asks who sang the song first. Boyce says Gaye. Robinson pays up and Gordy pockets his winnings. It’s true that Gaye recorded the song before Knight, in spring 1967, but it wasn’t released as a single then. Knight’s version was, in September 1967, and reached number 2 in the charts. Gaye’s version was included on his album ‘In the Groove’, released in August 1968, and came out as a single that October, reaching number 1 before the year was out. Berry Gordy shows how to make a profit by asking the right question.
In the closing stages of Hitsville, Gordy acknowledges that, when he started up, his main objectives weren’t to put the Motor City on the cultural map or transmit black American music into the national and international mainstream as never before. He was looking, he says, to make some money and some music, and to meet some girls. He’d worked in the car industry in Michigan before founding Tamla Records (as the company was originally called). He understood the workings of a production line and used it as an organising principle in a creative context. But it wouldn’t be fair to characterise Gordy only as an entrepreneur and executive. He wrote good songs too – though not nearly as many as Smokey Robinson. He was more than an exceptional talent-spotter. He created an unprecedented environment into which to attract African-American musical talent.
Although the singers featured in Hitsville are more than familiar, you keep marvelling at how many greatly gifted people converged on Motown. Men, women and children: footage of early performances by the pre-adolescent Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson is an elating reminder of the last. Watching these artists at this distance in time, you can read their futures in their pasts – or not, as the case may be. It’s plain to see Diana Ross’s prima donna potential as well as her phenomenal abilities. There could be no guessing what the exuberant child Michael Jackson would become.
The archive footage available to the Turner brothers is, of course, pure gold. As usual in this kind of film, it’s sometimes frustrating not to hear more complete songs but the Turners may well have been anxious to avoid accusations of letting the music do their work for them. Their large cast of interviewees includes not only singers but also writers (including all three of the Holland-Dozier-Holland combo) and others on the Motown staff, dead and living. The company’s etiquette teacher Maxine Powell (1915-2013), dressed for the occasion in a huge hat, is a particular highlight. It was quite possible to move from one job in the set-up to another. Martha Reeves worked as a secretary in A&R until the day Mary Wells couldn’t get to a session and Reeves took her place in the studio. Reeves’s description of what happened is one of the many and-the-rest-is-history moments in Hitsville.
In the early stages, the narrative is too elaborate. I’m often grateful for subtitles nowadays but the animated script that appears on the screen to accompany words on the soundtrack, arrows pointing to and identifying people in photographs, and other explanatory details amount to information overload. After a while, the Turners drop the eccentric subtitling. The film settles down and becomes gradually gripping – not least in various contributors’ memories of being on the receiving end of racism. Motown’s ahead-of-the-game use of music videos is striking. There’s remarkable film of the Supremes lip-syncing ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ as they walk towards camera down a Paris street, flanked by a gendarme and passers-by who look beautifully unprepared for what’s happening.
The ‘Making of Motown’ subtitle reflects the shrewd decision to limit the timeframe of the story the Turners tell. Hitsville may be a sixtieth birthday party but its focus is on the period between the company’s inception in the late 1950s and the early 1970s, when the centre of operations moved from Detroit to Los Angeles. Although the narrative gets chronologically shaky here (the relocation seems to happen before late-1960s developments like the Black Panthers and psychedelic funk), it’s a smart move to draw the story to a conclusion at the point at which Gordy was pushing to expand Motown into other entertainment fields, especially motion pictures – a move that wasn’t entirely successful. It’s not surprising there’s a reference to, and a brief clip from, Lady Sings the Blues, even less surprising there’s no reference to Diana Ross’s subsequent movie vehicles.
This hardly matters, though. The music keeps playing and confirming Motown’s greatness. It’s amusing that the very last number on the soundtrack is the company song, whose lyrics several of its former employees try and sometimes fail to remember over the closing credits. Claudette Robinson, Smokey’s first wife, is the most appealing amnesiac. Her ex-husband and Gordy haven’t forgotten, though. They laugh their way through the verse and even reprise the chorus. It’s a cross between the Mickey Mouse Club song and a Communist Youth League anthem. It’s also an oddly apt way of ending Hitsville, which confirms Motown as itself a concoction – a surpassing fusion of commerce and art.
30 September 2019
