Melody 1971 reviews
All is peachy with them, but Ornshaw isn’t too happy about his friend being otherwise occupied so friction develops between the two boys and the couple get in trouble with their family and the school when they demand to be able to get married now, not in the future as the law demands. He stalks her (in a well meaning 12 year old sort of way) until eventually Melody falls for his charms too. Daniel falls madly in love with Melody when he spies on her dancing at school. Melody is a good natured dreamer who lives in a council flat with her mother, grandmother and father, although the latter spends more time at the pub than home. That is until Melody (Tracy Hyde) comes on the scene. The two are from very different backgrounds, which cause a few issues, but generally they’re inseparable as they get into mischief at school and home. Daniel befriends a naughty but likeable lad called Ornshaw (Jack Wild, also of Oliver! fame). – what a hideous title!) is set in present day (early 70s) London and follows Daniel ( Oliver himself, Mark Lester), a middle class boy starting at a mixed comprehensive school with a range of likeminded young rascals. Rather than telling a period tale of burgeoning adulthood in rural Sweden though, Melody (a.k.a. I opened my review of My Life as a Dog this morning by professing my love for coming of age dramas, and what do you know, the other title I had to review today is another coming of age film. Melody is unashamedly sweet but its appeal extends beyond mere nostalgia it's a glimpse of an era when British cinema made contemporary, original films for children with nary a superhero, wizard or animated creature in sight.Starring: Mark Lester, Tracy Hyde, Jack Wild Puttnam lets slip that the original story was based on him meeting his future wife at school, a marriage that’s lasted as long as the movie. Something of a cult movie, Melody apparently inspired Alfonso Cuarón to become a film-maker, and Wes Anderson pays homage to it in Moonrise Kingdom. The film kickstarted several careers: even though it was a flop in the UK and US, it was huge in Japan and its success there bankrolled Puttnam's next few projects. The extras are a little basic – baldly-shot interviews with Hussein, Parker, Puttnam and Lester, but the anecdotes about the film’s production are fun. Their pop ballads soundtrack the tale of young lovers, paired well with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's Teach Your Children.
#Melody 1971 reviews movie#
Melody marked Parker’s debut in the British film industry, alongside David Puttnam, a first-time producer who used his acquisition of the Bee Gees’ song cycle as collateral to get the movie made. Together they helped first-time director Waris Hussein (moving from BBC drama) to create a naturalistic, low budget vision of summer in the city (with a foray to the Weymouth seaside).Īlmost documentary in its visual style – Hussein describes in one of the extras here how many of the action scenes were shot in one take – it was actually tightly scripted by Alan Parker, then making a living as an advertising copywriter. Credit must go to cinematographer Peter Suschitzky (son of Wolf, the acclaimed documentary photographer of London, and the cinematographer on Get Carter, among other films) and production designer Garvik Losey (son of Joseph). Mainly shot on location, the story plays out in Battersea churchyards, Trafalgar Square and sleazy Soho, council estates, railway edge lands and a musty school. Watching the newly-restored Melody is to take a time machine back to London in the late 1960s – post-war, pre-developers. Think Jules et Jim for an innocent, pre-teen audience mixed with a sprinkling of school anarchy à la Zero de Conduite and If., with character actor stalwarts Roy Kinnear, Keith Barron and Sheila Steafel thrown into the mix. Mark Lester and Jack Wild, then fresh off the megahit musical Oliver!, play two south London lads whose friendship is interrupted when one of them meets a girl ( Tracy Hyde, pictured below, in her debut role). Luckily this is not the case with Melody (also known under a distributor-enforced title as S.W.A.L.K.), unseen since its first release in 1971 when I was even younger than its central characters, a couple of 12-year-olds who fall in love much to their parents’ and teachers’ disapproval.