It's A Monogram Bulls-Eye!

Music and Merriment in Melody Parade (1943)

"A musical that will please the less critical," said Showman's Trade Review, so where does that leave viewers who'd pick Melody Parade over any number of deluxe tune-fests from war years? Monogram took pride in the show, previewing finished reels to visiting showmen during summer '43, touting Mono variant on an all-star singing cast: Mary Beth Hughes, Eddie Quillan, Tim and Irene Ryan, plus in-for-comedy Mantan Moreland --- all these familiar and liked faces to cheer customers staying for a second feature. Wartime boom in attendance was a help, patron appetite for musicals being acute so as to get minds off meatless dining and gas rations. Melody Parade got reward same as majors for supplying light-heart relief, scoring Broadway placement at the RKO Palace starting 8/19/43, a coup worth its weight in boastful trade ads that came after. Melody Parade was strong argument that Monogram was aiming for fences and could serve song-dance with the best of them.

Melody Parade Supports a '43 Reissue of The Oklahoma Kid

Parade's plot would neatly sustain 72 minute haul: Can a hat check girl headline for a struggling club and make the grade with Ted Fio Rito's orchestra? The conclusion, if foregone, was fun in the getting there, as was laff-making to bookend swing numbers. Monogram did their musicals a cunning way --- build one elaborate nitery set and confine action to it, with cleff and comedy enough to distract from fact we're riding coach. So who needed Technicolor all the time? Not a few MGM and Fox tuners were overstuffed turkeys, to which Melody Parade was modest and enjoyable appetizer, if not antidote. It doesn't take much watching of Tim and Irene to become a fan; coming away from this, you could hope there were a dozen more Monograms spotlighting the pair. Fact is, Tim was very much a creative influence behind this and others from the company, and rare though they are on DVD, some of the Mono musicals have shown up at streaming addresses like Amazon and satellite On-Demands. They were made humbly to please a crowd, even if those "less critical," which should include much of GPS readership.