Well, my expectations were through the roof for this one – I mean, more than ever. The title, the poster (challenging The Wizard of Oz of all things proclaiming it as “The Happiest Film Ever Made!”), the fact it was written by a young Alan Parker with early music from the Bee Gees all over the soundtrack. From the first musical montage to the last, I was just enraptured by the screen, and those were just the moments without Tracy Hyde (who plays the eponymous Melody) … when she’s on the screen, I just wanna crawl into the movie and live there.

It’s essentially an anti-authoritarian, pro-children love story. People have called it a young Graduate and that’s certainly a comparison I’d agree with but hadn’t considered. Due it’s hard-to-find status, its year of release and the importance of the soundtrack I found it very like The Strawberry Statement, perhaps that movie put in a blender with If… and Whistle Down the Wind or something. The kids here are very real – reminding me of the “Another Brick in a Wall” sequence of another Alan Parker movie, The Wall. Some of the acting on the sidelines is thus a little dodgy but not enough to be a distraction. The adults are entirely portrayed the way children see them and all the performers respect this extreme indictment of the adult world.

What it comes down to is Love with a capital L – instead of “The End” title at the end, you get a message from Melody herself, with kisses, perhaps an answer to the question, “So what’s the moral of the story?” … it reads, simply, “To Love Somebody … Love Melody xxx”. Midway through the movie, Melody and the boy who has a crush on her (Mark Lester, of Oliver!, no less – Jack Wild, the Artful Dodger, plays his buddy and the relationship is much the same – you could quite imagine Ornshaw here breaking into “Consider Yourself” at times, in fact) decide they want to get married. Right Now. There’s a wonderful montage where they skip school that reminded me of the “Our House” scene in Strawberry Statement, and when she returns home, Melody finally comes to the passionate plea to her parents, “I like being with Daniel more than I like doing geography. Why is it so difficult when all I want to do is be happy? I just don’t understand it, I can’t think why it’s so terrible – please tell me ‘cos I just don’t understand!” It’s all incredibly sweet, but it resonates with me particularly strongly, and again recalls the attitude of James Kunen in his book of “The Strawberry Statement” – speaking on much larger issues as war etc, he comes to the same kind of point, “Nobody fight anymore. Of course it’s not that simple. But I must be stupid because it seems that simple to me.”

Some people dismiss it as innocence or worse, naivety, and I know I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again – it’s this innocence that I really think people chicken out on when they declare it can’t be reclaimed, and what makes movies like this, especially when they’ve had so little attention for so long, particularly important. This is a movie I’ll hold close for as long as I’m around.

Tags: anarchy, anti-establishment, British, cuties, innocence, love, school

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