...You must have once been in love, and you must have once been a child.
I hadn't realized anyone else had seen this film, nor that it had such a similar impact on everybody. I first saw this film when I was a child growing up in Las Vegas, Nevada. It would play on the afternoon "Movie with Gus", some local show that picked up movies in syndication. I may have been 10 or 12 years old. I loved it immediately. I could identify with the pain of both lovers, and the friend. It's such a universal story that it rises above the cultural, class, and period distinctions.
I remember staying up to watch the movie again at 1:00 AM. Then when it was repeated on the weekend. From that point on, I made it a weekly ritual to scan through the television guide to see if Melody was on that week. In those days they must have had a pretty set schedule of syndication because, you could count on the film making the rounds again. But with the rise of cable television and video, the movie vanished from the schedule. (Now you have a hundred channels offering identical content on different timetables.)
Years later I found the film on VHS (literally jumped up and down in the store) and proceeded to rent it repeatedly to show to my friends. Everyone who saw it, even as adults, loved it. I found the soundtrack a few years back as a Japanese import. I've searched for the VHS copy everywhere since. There must have been thousands of VHS copies at one time, which have probably all been dumped. I consider myself a cinephile, but with this I'd accept a tenth-generation copy just to have it again. The beauty of this film is in it's performances.
Alan Parker, who co-wrote Melody, revisited the themes again in his later films, which always seem to include a sub-theme of unrequited love. I wonder to this day if Alan Parker has any fondness for this film, or if he sees it as something of a freshman work.
I hadn't realized anyone else had seen this film, nor that it had such a similar impact on everybody. I first saw this film when I was a child growing up in Las Vegas, Nevada. It would play on the afternoon "Movie with Gus", some local show that picked up movies in syndication. I may have been 10 or 12 years old. I loved it immediately. I could identify with the pain of both lovers, and the friend. It's such a universal story that it rises above the cultural, class, and period distinctions.
I remember staying up to watch the movie again at 1:00 AM. Then when it was repeated on the weekend. From that point on, I made it a weekly ritual to scan through the television guide to see if Melody was on that week. In those days they must have had a pretty set schedule of syndication because, you could count on the film making the rounds again. But with the rise of cable television and video, the movie vanished from the schedule. (Now you have a hundred channels offering identical content on different timetables.)
Years later I found the film on VHS (literally jumped up and down in the store) and proceeded to rent it repeatedly to show to my friends. Everyone who saw it, even as adults, loved it. I found the soundtrack a few years back as a Japanese import. I've searched for the VHS copy everywhere since. There must have been thousands of VHS copies at one time, which have probably all been dumped. I consider myself a cinephile, but with this I'd accept a tenth-generation copy just to have it again. The beauty of this film is in it's performances.
Alan Parker, who co-wrote Melody, revisited the themes again in his later films, which always seem to include a sub-theme of unrequited love. I wonder to this day if Alan Parker has any fondness for this film, or if he sees it as something of a freshman work.