Devil on Horseback

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.