Rent Melody (1971)

The Plot Was the Cast List - Melody review by griggs

I kept losing the plot of Melody to a much better one: working out where I recognised everyone from.

Waris Hussein reunites Mark Lester and Jack Wild after Oliver! — this time nobody’s selling them into Victorian servitude. Wild’s Ornshaw supplies most of the mischief, and Tracy Hyde plays it straight enough that two kids deciding to marry looks like the only sane plan around, adults and their tedium be damned.

Meanwhile, half of British television wanders through the school gates — Roy Kinnear, Sheila Steafel, Kate Williams, Keith Barron — and every few minutes another face sends me digging through decades of half-remembered sitcoms. At some point I should’ve been following the plot.

Alan Parker wrote it, a few years before handing kids pinstripes and custard guns in Bugsy Malone — children versus authority was apparently his thing for a while. The Bee Gees handle the mood lighting, Hussein keeps things loose, and the whole thing looks like Britain before beige became aspirational.

Thin story, thick nostalgia. Three stars, one of them for repeatedly shouting “oh, it’s him” at the telly.