The 10 greatest Motown needle drops in cinema history
Motown Records played an outsized role in the music industry starting in the 1960s, introducing the world to some of the biggest musical talents of the century. The Supremes, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, The Jackson 5, and Marvin Gaye all got their start under the watchful tutelage of Berry Gordy, and together, they helped reshape pop music forever.
As the Motown sound was dominating airwaves in the 1960s and ‘70s, Hollywood took notice and started incorporating the music into its soundtracks. Ever since then, Motown has been an inescapable element of cinema as well.
There are many ways that Motown artists have helped elevate movies with their distinctive sound. Their music has been used in everything from nostalgic dramas to irreverent parodies, almost always acting as a show stopping focal point of a scene. In some of the most memorable instances, such as in John Carpenter’s The Thing, it’s the juxtaposition of the sound and the context of the scene that make the music a perfect fit.
One notable omission from this list is Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. It uses Motown music liberally, but its invocation of classic hits is more lazy than meaningful, mining the catalogue for an aesthetic that the filmmakers themselves couldn’t create on their own. The films that do make the list are the ones that use the music to deepen the story rather than merely add a dazzling but superficial flourish.
The 10 greatest Motown needle drops:
‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’ by Stevie Wonder in ‘Woman in Red’
Let’s get one thing clear right off the bat: The Woman in Red is not a memorable film. Directed by and starring Gene Wilder, it follows a middle-aged family man who falls hook, line, and sinker for a mysterious woman in a red dress, played by Kelly LeBrock. He tries to have an affair with her, but things don’t go according to his fantasy. It hasn’t aged particularly well and has nothing new to say about its familiar premise, but the one thing it does have going for it is a soundtrack by Stevie Wonder.
Perhaps you’ve heard of him. Wonder signed a contract with Motown Records when he was 11 years old, and by the time he was writing original songs for The Woman in Red, he was at the peak of his celebrity. One of the pieces he wrote specifically for the film was a little song entitled ‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’.
Not only was it the best thing about the entire movie, but it earned Wonder an Oscar and became his bestselling single to date. When the needle drops on the track in the film, it’s as if the world stops dead in its tracks, overwhelmed by the incongruity of such a breathtaking piece of genius in such a mediocre context.
‘Ain’t No Mountain’ by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell in ‘Remember the Titans’
Boaz Yakin’s 2000 sports period drama centres on a Black football coach in 1970s America, played by Denzel Washington, who is hired to help racially integrate a high school team. He’s met with resistance at every turn, including by his assistant coach and the school’s board, which informs him that he’ll be sacked if he doesn’t win every single game. The soundtrack is chock full of iconic musical artists, including Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and The Hollies, but it’s a Motown track that steals the show.
In one scene, the team piles into the locker room after training and are finally able to relax as a group. As they toss affectionate insults at each other, the song ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’, performed by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, comes on the radio, and one of the players turns the volume up to maximum. A dance party ensues, with all the players singing and moving to the music. It’s a bit on the nose, but it signals a shift in the team’s dynamics where racial tensions are calmed, and everyone can get caught up in the infectious energy of the music.
‘Baby Love’ by The Supremes in ‘Jackie Brown’
Quentin Tarantino has a long history of pitch-perfect needle drops in his movies. As a fan of genre pictures and a devotee of all things retro, he’s had ample opportunity to use some of the greatest tracks ever produced. ‘Baby Love’ isn’t the most show-stopping musical interlude he’s ever done, but it is a bite-sized encapsulation of how the director uses music to deepen his stories rather than merely give them glossy window dressing.
Simone (Hattie Winston) is barely a side character. Her role is to help facilitate a test run of the scheme to smuggle hundreds of thousands of dollars out from under the nose of the authorities. Her appearance is exceedingly brief, but during an exchange with Robert De Niro’s Louis Gara, she makes the most out of every second of screen time. Dressed in a tight blue sequin gown, she dances to ‘Baby Love’ while Louis sits in a chair in the living room, watching her with impatience written all over his face.
It’s yet another example of why Tarantino is such a master at world-building. In less than a minute, he creates a fully fleshed-out, eccentric character, even though she barely factors into the overall narrative. Plot-wise, it’s completely unnecessary, but in terms of creating an immersive world of believable people, it’s a masterclass.
“Nowhere To Run” by Martha and the Vandellas in ‘Good Morning, Vietnam’ (1987)
Robin Williams earned his first Oscar nomination for his portrayal of American DJ Adrian Cronauer in Barry Levinson’s comedy-drama about the Vietnam War. His performance helped seal his transition from stand-up to movies, but it also provided the perfect accompaniment for some of the best music of the 1960s. Cronauer takes it upon himself to liven up the formal radio broadcasts with contemporary pop hits, so it’s no surprise when he hits play on Martha and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere To Run.”
As with so many uses of popular music in Vietnam War movies, however, the choice of song is also a statement. As the track plays, the scene cuts to a montage of the daily routine of the soldiers as they warm up with jumping jacks, lounge around on armoured vehicles, and eye up local women. The lyrics are pretty literal – these men are stuck somewhere that most of them probably don’t want to be. It doesn’t take the harrowing juxtaposition that The Miracles’ “The Tracks of My Tears” does in Platoon, but it gets the point across.
‘It’s The Same Old Song’ by The Four Tops in ‘Blood Simple’ (1984)
Like Tarantino, the Coen brothers have woven music into their filmography from the beginning, using it as an inseparable element of the storytelling. In the same way that many directors have a rotating ensemble of actors, the Coens have two musical secret weapons who have helped forge their signature style: composer Carter Burwell and musician and record producer T Bone Burnett.
This focus on sonic storytelling dates all the way back to the brothers’ first feature film, 1984’s Blood Simple. It was also Burwell’s first credit as a composer, but it’s a Motown track that provides a striking moment of depth in the film. The plot concerns a bar owner in a small town in Texas who hires someone to murder his wife (Frances McDormand) and employee (John Getz) when he discovers that they’re having an affair.
In one scene, a bartender played by Samm-Art Williams leaps over the bar just as the live band leaves the stage for a break. The camera drops to his shoes, and we follow his white high tops in closeup as he strides to the jukebox, flips a coin, and slots it into the machine. ‘It’s The Same Old Song’ by The Four Tops floods the bar. He strides back to the counter, leaps on top of it, and does a quick dance step before resuming his position behind the bar. It’s a small moment, but in that 40 seconds, the directors do enough character and world-building to fit an entire movie. It’s like a cinematic haiku – a deceptively brief interlude that contains multitudes.
‘Let’s Get It On’ by Marvin Gaye in ‘Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me’ (1999)
There are classier movies out there, and it could be argued that Marvin Gaye deserved better, but it’s hard to deny that Mike Myers was going all in on the joke when he used the Prince of Motown’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ during a particularly awkward sexual encounter. The second instalment in the Austin Powers series, The Spy Who Shagged Me, centres on Dr Evil’s attempts to steal Powers’s mojo with a mechanical contraption and use it to his own ends.
One of these ends is seduction. After drinking a single sip of the mojo, Dr Evil whips his face around to the camera, one eyebrow raised, and locks eyes with Frau Farbissina as the needle drops on Gaye’s smoothest of smooth sex ballads. Suffice it to say that the doctor and the frau do indeed get it on in a sequence that feels more like a music video than a movie scene, complete with the subtle eruption of a volcano to really hammer the point home.
‘Superstition’ by Stevie Wonder in ‘The Thing’ (1982)
The Thing is an incredibly tense film. John Carpenter’s thematic remake of Alien in Antarctica stars Kurt Russell as the helicopter pilot for a group of American researchers on a distant outpost in the barren tundra who is beset by a mysterious extraterrestrial creature that takes the shape of its victims. When the group realises that any one of them could be the vessel for The Thing, paranoia takes hold, and gooey gore splatters its way through the rest of the running time.
In the brief period when the researchers know that there is something strange afoot but have yet to learn that it is currently in the form of a sledge dog, Nauls, the cook, hits play on Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition.’ The track reverberates through the research centre, foreshadowing the paranoia that is about to rip the little group apart.
The scene cuts to several empty rooms, the utter tranquillity turning into a sense of nailbiting foreboding. When the dog appears again, the camera follows it down the corridor. It’s a spine-chilling moment made all the more creepy by the incongruity of the funky music and the all-too-accurate lyrics.
‘The Tracks of My Tears’ by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles in ‘Platoon’ (1986)
Oliver Stone was working from experience when he made Platoon in 1986. It follows a young soldier (Charlie Sheen) who joins the Vietnam War and finds himself stuck between a platoon sergeant and squad leader who have very different codes of morality and outlooks on the war. Its disorienting and unglamorous depiction of on-the-ground combat is one of the most harrowing and supposedly accurate portrayals of modern warfare, and it earned Stone immediate admiration from the industry.
In one scene, the soldiers seek a brief respite from the world to smoke marijuana, dance, and forget the perilous, hopeless reality they’ve found themselves in. One of the songs they listen to is ‘The Tracks of My Tears’ by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles.
It’s an immersive song and easy to dance to, but its lyrics hint at the soldier’s true feelings, telling a story of a narrator who looks happy on the outside but is hiding deep pain and turmoil behind their smile. As the young soldiers dance, some with bandages and all with a hollowness in their eyes, the music captures the tragedy of the moment more succinctly than any dialogue could have.
‘Ain’t Too Proud To Beg’ by The Temptations in ‘The Big Chill’ (1983)
There is an irony about a film featuring an all-white cast being utterly dominated by Motown music, but Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill is probably the most famous example of how the Motown Sound can carry not only a scene, but an entire film. Released in 1983, it follows a group of baby boomers who met in college and reunite for the funeral of one of their friends who has died by suicide. Now in their thirties, they are in vastly different places in life. Some are unhappy in love, some are unhappy in work, and others seemingly have it all. During their weekend together, the group bonds again and wonders where it all went wrong.
Much of the film is centred on nostalgia over lost youth, a sentiment fueled by the 1960s soundtrack. Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and Three Dog Night are all in there, creating a soundtrack that became so iconic in its own right that it inspired a second album entitled More Songs From the Original Soundtrack of The Big Chill.
In the most memorable use of music in the film, the group cleans up after a climactic dinner scene to The Temptation’s ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.’ It’s a dance party, and a moment when they can all put aside the years that have come between them and get lost in the joy of their youth once again.
‘What’s Going On’ by Marvin Gaye in ‘Da 5 Bloods’ (2020)
It is a testament to Marvin Gaye’s artistry that his music could fit in both the most ridiculous and the most haunting scenes on this list. His contribution to Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods surpasses any other use of Motown music in cinema. Not only is there a perfect synergy between the themes of the film and the track, but Lee uncovered a rare version of the song that made it even more poignant.
Da 5 Bloods follows a group of American veterans who return to Vietnam to recover the remains of their squad leader and take back the treasure they buried in the jungle decades before. Gaye released his landmark album What’s Going On in 1971 at the height of the war when his brother was deployed. At the time, he was trying to extricate himself from the Motown label, itching to stretch his artistic muscles after being under the thumb of Berry Gordy for a decade. The album is full of the turmoil and anger that defined the period for young people, but it also features an element of hope. It became an era-defining album in its own right, and remains the artist’s greatest work.
Lee does justice to Gaye’s wish to break free from the Motown Sound by using an a capella version of the title track during a key scene in the movie. It’s a haunting rendition that the director found online and cleaned up to clarify the artist’s voice. Free from the upbeat trappings of the Motown production, it is a plaintive eulogy to a lost generation from one of the greatest music artists of the 20th century.
