Devil on Horseback

Racing films were very popular in the fifties.This is routine but watchable.Liam Redmond chews the scenery but Sam Kydd,with a longer part than usual,is excellent.

This fairly standard story of how Jeremy Spenser wants to win horse races at all costs and learns the price, contains the usual assortment of racetrack eccentrics, particularly Liam Redmond who outbrogues Barry Fitzgerald in a John Ford movie; most notably, it stars Googie Withers and her real life husband, John McCallum, as a horse owner and trainer who mentor the boy -- and fall in love of course. It's one of the last leading roles for Miss Withers, who was so distinguished by this point that a little of her was enough to distinguish any picture.

It's beautifully lensed by Denny Densham, whose long career in the GPO documentary unit gave him the skills to handle landscape and long-distance movement. He rarely got the chance to be the cinematographer on a feature. Here, his shots of races seem to float.

Suggestions were made at the time of the film's release, that it was a fiction inspired by the early career of the jockey Sir Gordon Richards. Starring Jeremy Spenser, Googie Withers and real life husband John McCallum with support from those omni-present stalwarts of British Cinema, Sam Kydd, Meredith Edwards and Liam Redmond, it's a tale of a 15 year old (Spenser) from Wigan who leaves the coal mines and the pit ponies to make it good 'down south' as a jockey. The acting is professional as one would expect but the story is pretty slight and the monochrome photography doesn't help with jockey identification in the race sequences. Also the mores of the time were not as now and there are a couple of scenes leaving one wincing a little at what was acceptable then. A good tunefully horsey score by the ever reliable Malcolm Arnold keeps things galloping along.