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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.

'Man of Africa' was shown at the BFI London in November 2011 in the presence of Cyril Frankel who wrote the original story and directed the movie. The nonagenarian Mr Frankel treated the appreciative audience to an erudite after screening Q & A during which he stated his ambition to have the film shown in East Africa as he would "love to see the reaction of audiences there". I do not know what the odds are of Mr Frankel fulfilling this objective but if the rarity of showings in the UK is any indication, my guess is they are just about nil. According to an informative BFI leaflet distributed at the showing, the film was shown at the 1954 Edinburgh Film Festival and in limited release the same year in the USA in the director's 74 minute version. It was then mutilated (Mr Frankel's word) to a 44 minute version without the knowledge or approval of the director and shown as a support film in some UK cinemas in 1955/6. While the Edinburgh showing was well received this was not the case with the 44 minute version and the film then languished unseen until this single 74 minute BFI showing.

In 1952 some of the Bagika people of the Kigezi region of Uganda were persuaded to migrate from their over-cultivated highland home to a more fertile but uncultivated lowland region. What started life as a planned documentary of this event evolved into a dramatisation. The film was shot on a very tight budget entirely on location using a British crew of just seven including the director. The film was cast entirely from the local population none of whom had acted previously and because some lacked English the decision was taken to utilise a narrator, also black. This was the first film made by the British film industry featuring an all black cast and the first to film them naturalistically rather than as a butt of humour or in servitude and as such was unique at the time. Indeed it is much to Frankel's credit that he managed to avoid virtually all of the cinema clichés of the day, not only concerning race but also of filming in Africa. For the music, the services of Malcolm Arnold, who had previously scored 'Devil on Horseback' for Frankel, were called upon. There are some musical threads connecting with Arnold's later score for the John Huston movie 'The Roots of Heaven', also set in Africa.

The Boy and the Bridge is a charming, haunting, oddity of a film, almost as much a tourist information film of Tower Bridge and the area of London in that vicinity as it is a story of the naïve innocence that childhood was in the fifties.

Lovingly filmed, the travelogue part is now, in many respects, an historical document, showing in some detail a comparatively small area of London as it was around 50 years ago.

It is something of a rarity for the star of a film to be a boy aged around 11 but this is the case here. Young Tommy Doyle, very well played by Ian Maclaine in his only acting role mentioned in this site, lives with his father, a stereotypical, hard drinking, heart-of-gold Irishman played by Liam Redmond. As a result of a drunken fracas, a grandfather clock gets "smashed in the face" by the father and when, the following day, he is sought by the police, young Tommy puts two and two together and believes his father has killed a man.

Shame over what his father has done and fear of being taken into custody cause Tommy to go on the run and by fortune he finds access to Tower Bridge where he manages to set up home in a disused room in one of the towers. Befriended only by Sammy the Seagull, he goes about the task of setting up home and fending for himself. There are many shots of the behind-the-scenes workings of the bridge which are as interesting now as when filmed.

For the first half of the film there is minimal dialogue, indeed Tommy, who had been on screen for most of the time, doesn't say a word. One of the joys of The Boy and the Bridge is a musical score of considerable charm and invention by Malcolm Arnold and, by virtue of the lack of dialogue he has more time than is usual in movies to develop his ideas. In Whistle Down the Wind, another film dealing with childhood perceptions, Arnold lightened proceedings by the use of a tuneful and lilting score and he was able to do the same for The Boy and the Bridge.

That other reviewers are recalling this film from decades earlier is ample testimony both to the haunting quality of this movie and its rarity. It is high time it received the recognition and circulation it deserves.

Update May 2017. This film is now available to view from the BFI. Googling 'BFI Boy and the Bridge' will get you there.

Further update May 2023. There is a fascinating major article on this movie (and others scored by Malcolm Arnold) in a new book "The Film Music of Malcolm Arnold" by Alan Poulton and David Dunstan and published by The Malcolm Arnold Society ISBN 9798781218080.