Childs play… Melody (1971)

This is a film I remember being promoted in my sister’s Jackie magazine probably because of the presence of Jack Wild who had become a teenage pin-up after playing the Artful Dodger both on stage and then in the film Oliver (1968) before then staring in the American TV series H.R. Pufnstuf. He was slightly older than his parts and in Melody he was a 17-year old playing 13 alongside fellow Oliver alumnus Mark Lester (12 during filming in May 1970) and Tracy Hyde (who had just turned 11).

Wild had been discovered playing football by June Collins – mother of fellow child actor Phil… who signed him up for the Barbara Speake Stage School along with his brother Arthur. He certainly had his moment but did get tired of playing kids as he entered his twenties and, according to his obituary in the Daily Telegraph, was already an alcoholic by 21. His undoubted talent – a high-energy screen presence with subtlety and wit – was undermined by such casting and despite the occasional TV and film role, most of the rest of his shortened career was spent in theatre.

In this film, originally titled S.W.A.L.K.  (Sealed With a Loving Kiss) he’s very convincing as young tearaway Tom Ornshaw and helps to bring out the best from Lester and Hyde who also do well on their own as Daniel Latimer and the titular Melody Perkins, pre-teenagers in love. The film popped up on Talking Pictures and, after a half century I finally got to watch what I had only read about in the above-mentioned copy of Jackie…

One of these two could drive a car and go to the pub...

The script was from Alan Parker and he has said it combined elements of his own childhood experience in Islington as well as that of producer David Putnam. Given the significance of these gentlemen’s later careers it’s clear to say that Melody, despite only really being a big hit in Japan, set them on their way. For Parker, who was second unit director for some scenes, it gave him the desire to make more films and to direct whilst for Putnam, the film kept his fledgling production company afloat.

There are so many things to recommend the film, not least the slice of South London life it offers as background – Lambeth in 1970 – as well as the little-changed Weymouth sea front in one sequence. It’s also a very well-made film with director Waris Hussein marshalling his younger cast well and portraying the matter of “love” in a convincing way. As Melody says at one point as she and Daniel are interviewed by the headmaster – James Cossins on superb form – they want to be together but “we don’t really understand…”

I can only relate having been smitten with classmate Julie Barton aged 11 and spending my weekends longing for Mondays and the sight of her freckled face in assembly. Unlike Daniel though I was barely able to speak to Julie and any chances were dashed when I went to a local comprehensive and she moved. It’s fine… I’m over it now!

Sheila's here!

Like me perhaps, Daniel is a quirky lad, and how could he not be with a mother played by the great Sheila Steafel and a step-father (Keith Barron) who seems continually annoyed with him. At one point Tom sets fir to his newspaper and is sent to his room where his mother soon forgives him, over-compensating perhaps. Daniel befriends Tom who is from different social circumstances and has to look after his Grandad after school, and, after sweetly suggesting that his mother might help, Daniel offers his help after she’s side-tracked by a Women’s Institute meeting.

The pal’s friendship is soon challenged by Daniel’s growing attraction to Melody, a development he isn’t yet capable of verbalising as the two hover around each other as much in fear as affection with the jeers of their immature classmates an ever present guarantee… There are so many moments of recognition and shared embarrassment you watch this with your inner, half-remembered childlike wonder at the unknown and uncertain connections you make that only grow in complexity as you mature.

Jack goes Wild!

The leads are only a handful of years older than me and so, this is almost my generation and the locations and fashions – almost invisible at the time – now bring that sharp pang of nostalgia to accompany the recognition of painful lessons learned. Hussein paces the story well and the central love is woven through many funny incidents of school life, from the bullying history teacher (played by Scouser Ken Jones who was so very good at playing unlovely!), to the boys’ attempt to make an explosive using weedkiller which fail repeatedly on the wastelands near Clapham Junction. Turns out making a bomb is just as mysterious as establishing a romantic connection with the opposite sex: trial and error no matter how much study is undertaken.

The supporting cast of adults is superb, creating a school full of oddball teachers who to paraphrase Tom, want to be in charge but also their friends after a school disco throws everyone together. We also have Roy Kinnear and Kate Williams as Melody’s parents and both are as good as you remember – I found myself wishing Kate had done more Ken Loach films after playing Beryl in Poor Cow, such a fine actor and what a long career she is having! Hilda Barry is also fab as Grandma Perkins, all Nans looked like her in 1971…

There’s a soundtrack featuring five songs from the Bee Gees and, surprisingly, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young singing Graham Nash’s Teach Your Children to end the film on a suitably poignant note. That sounds more 1971 to me than the brothers Gibb who are still in their post-psychedelic baroque period sweet though their songs are, especially Melody Fair which gives the film it’s title and main character. Pop music moved so quickly in those days and I remain acutely aware of every shift I remember and I do recall the First of May, one of the twoBee Gee hits from the film and released in 1969. By 1971 though, it’s all change and time for some noise with T-Rex, Slade and The Sweet!

Dusty Verdict: Melody is a time capsule in so many ways but still resonates with the eternal truths of developing childhood. It takes some skill to make a film like this with children who may not have experienced anything like it before and that’s a tribute to the writing and direction. The film’s success in Japan and elsewhere overseas helped return a profit and opening the way for Puttnam and Parker to refresh British film over the next decade and it remains influential with Wes Anderson saying it inspired Moonrise Kingdom. It’s well worth a watch and is available on TPTV as well as Blu-ray.

And you, of tender years
Can't know the fears your elders grew by
Help them with your youth
They seek the truth before they can die

Crosby Stills Nash & Young Teach Your Children (Nash)

 

 

Marty's choice... The Legend of Hell House (1973)

 

Although the story of this film is fictitious, the events depicted involving psychic phenomena are not only very much within the bounds of possibility but could well be true.

Tom Corbett, Clairvoyant and Psychic Consultant to European Royalty

 

The BFI recently screened this film as part of the series celebrating Martin Scorsese’s favourite British films not directed by Michael Powell (of course) and it fully justifies the director’s favour on a number of levels and it makes me wonder why I haven’t watched it before. If you want an engaging haunted house mystery that maintains its edge without resorting to gore and predictable jump scares then this is it. The performances of the four leads are what creates the tension and John Hough directs his players and atmosphere very well aided by an uncanny score from electronica pioneer Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson.

The premise is grand and simple with wealthy old man Rudolph Deutsch (the great Roland Culver) calling scientist Dr. Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill) to his fabulous country house (take a bow Blenheim Palace) to task him with proving the existence or otherwise of an afterlife. Barrett is a sceptic of course but this is why he gets the big bucks, to put the Deutch’s mind at rest either way, by staying a week at the incredibly haunted Belasco “Hell” House. Emeric Belasco was a reputed sadist and free-range pervert who is believed to have committed multiple murders after one excessively sordid orgy of evil. Any relation to the Great Mage Alistair Crowley and Boleskine House, the Scottish mansion where he attempted to summon the 12 Kings and Dukes of Hell, is purely co-incidental.

Pamela Franklin

The House’s horrific reputation is well earned with a previous scientific survey resulting in disaster with multiple fatalities and only one survivor Benjamin Franklin Fischer (Roddy McDowall – hurrah!!) who barely kept his sanity. Fischer is a “physical” psychic around whom supernatural phenomena is expressed through smashing household objects. He is joined by Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin) whose gift is more cerebral and allows her to commune with the spirits of "surviving personalities" which to Dr Barrett are nothing more than residual electromagnetic energies. He ain’t afraid of no ghosts.

Now, if all this sounds unpromising you have to have the cast who can not only say all of this with a straight face but also truly believe it and this is where the film utterly delivers… The three aforementioned, together with Gayle Hunnicutt as Barrett’s wife Ann, respect the story which is the only way to truly frighten an audience about supernatural possibilities by simply acting natural. Well, that and things going bump in the night but Hough’s touch is rather more delicate than many directing for Hammer, Amicus or Tigon at this time.

 

Clive Revill

From the opening quote from one Tom Corbett – an actual clairvoyant who probably did consult at least one royal family - onwards, the film adopts a “scientific” approach to the subject and with a course of events mapped out over individual days much like experiments that have taken place in these “haunted” locations. It’s very forensic approach to the narrative, allowing the building of an evidence-base for the unsettling events that unfold.

The four assemble at the house on Monday 20^th December, ghosts clearly love Christmas, with the Barretts driven over in Deutsch’s Daimler with his assistant (Peter Bowles) whilst Benjamin grimly walks from a train station and Florence floats past a church at a Dutch angle… Hough films his characters close up and often from below all of which creates an atmosphere of claustrophobic dread. As they approach the house there’s a wide angled shot before a close-up of Florence looking up the forbidding granite grey as the others, still in focus, approach the door. We’re already in the minds of these characters and Pamela Franklin is the ace in the pack, expressing intense sensitivity and innocence – her Florence is wide open to the possibilities ahead and if they are malevolent we know she will be hit hard.

Roddy McDowall

After dinner at 8.46pm, Florence begins to sense something and later in her room she not only feels the same presence who she believes is the son of Belasco, but her bed clothes are inexplicably rolled back. The next day Professor Barrett duly wires her up in an attempt to measure the energies causing these phenomena. It’s an impressive sequence that has the audience grasping at the possibility that we are still in the rational world. Hough’s camera is fixed on Franklin and, indeed on the legs she reveals wearing a leotard – the male gaze or a hint at the reasons she is the first to be “contacted”. Ectoplasm shoots from her fingers and even as the Professor notes this into his recording of the events we know things will get out of hand.

Later on, glasses are smashed as they eat dinner and during the night Ann comes under some kind of demonic sexual possession during which she attempts to seduce Benjamin. Her husband’s natural response is to bring in bigger machines in an attempt to drain the unnatural energies and cleans the building… but as the psychic assaults get fiercer will science win out or will they find the depth of the hell in the house?

Gayle Hunnicutt

Dusty verdict: As Roger Ebert said in his positive review at the time, this is far from the usual haunted house story and it allows for its characters to gradually get the measure of their situation as it, day-by-day, begins to reveal itself to them. Everything is explained but only in ways that leave the possibility of a rational scientific escape route… maybe.

The script was by Richard Matheson, adapted from his original book but with more graphic sexual scenes left mostly to our imagination – apart from one gratuitous scene with Ms Franklin. The score from Derbyshire and Hodgson combines electronica with some traditional instrumentation and is sadly not available separately although the film is on Blu-ray now.

Talking of music, I finally got to place the quote from Orbital's I Don't Know You People - from the Middle of Nowhere album – when a spirit possessing Florence calls out about their intrusion. Clearly a generation and more have been struck by the film and its influence is still felt… in fact, I’ve just felt a chill down my spine. Wait, what is that?!

Looks harmless enough...