The Black Rider

I like Director Wolf Rilla very much. German-born but raised in the UK, he has a different touch even as he abides by British stiff upper lip humor within the limits of Butcher studio's shoestring. That said, I am not British but British B pics of the 1950s and 1960s are the equal of just about any A pic anywhere in the world.

Rona Anderson constitutes an immediate plus: she has to be one of the most stunningly beautiful and elegant women ever! Hanley's comic touch helps convince one that this physically not particularly attractive male can snare such a bombastic beauty and from that point on we see how a band of rascals on motorbikes is taken down Famous Five style by Brocken Castle.

Great fluffy fun!

This sturdy British B-picture features a plot right out of Enid Blyton or Scooby-Doo. A gang of crooks, bent on smuggling "atomic sabotage equipment" into the country (crumbs!), are using the legend of the Black Rider to scare people away from crumbling Brocken Castle, where they have a secret headquarters in the dungeons. Gosh!

The film is best enjoyed for its view of the vanished innocence of 50s Britain. This is a place where smiling librarians select handpicked novels for little old ladies, where the teapot is always full, where the harmless village drunk (Kenneth Connor) is plied with booze by indulgent locals and where the local youths are too busy fixing their motorbikes to bother with vandalising the bus shelter. No Hells Angels these - they are all clean-cut and impeccably polite, trundling along the leafy lanes at a sedate 25 mph or participating in motorised egg-and-spoon races at the village fete.

Jimmy Hanley and Rona Anderson make a charming hero and heroine, Lionel Jeffries is good as the urbane villain and there' s a jolly, infuriatingly catchy theme tune. Nobody gets killed and even Hanley's irascible employer and future father-in-law turns out to be a decent cove at the end, even buying his own motorcycle and sidecar combination for some exhilarating spins with the missus. Somehow I doubt if Quentin Tarantino will be doing a remake.

Riding motorcycles (as they're called here) is one of the bad habits Jimmy Hanley picked up in the army as a dispatch rider at Normandy. Postwar as a member of the Swanhaven Motorcycling Club he tears along the South Coast (attractively shot both by day and by night by veteran cameraman Geoffrey Faithfull) with foxy librarian Rona Anderson on his pillion in the face of initial criticism from her father that they're just "nasty, noisy, clattering bags of machinery" until his path crosses that of 'The Black Monk', played with an Italian accent by veteran voice man Robert Rietty.

SPOILER COMING: As in countless Children's Film Foundation productions and episodes of 'Scooby Doo' the phantom turns out to be a courier for a bunch of smugglers, this time led by Lionel Jeffries (on this occasion the 'MacGuffin' being components for "an atomic sabotage weapon"). All at just 66 minutes and carrying a 'U' certificate; with a jaunty saxophone and guitar score by Wilfred Burns that will stay in your head long after you've forgotten the rest of the film.

'Black Rider' is a low budget B film, which sees the bright and breezy Jimmy Hanley, the 'honest and congenial young man next door type' endeavouring to foil the dastardly, rogue Lionel Jeffries and his henchmen from carrying out atomic sabotage in a sleepy coastal town. The storyline is something out of a boy's comic of that era, with the oily and supercilious moustached villain, Jefferies, always appropriately dressed in a black suit, with our forever smiling and irrepressibly, cheerful Hanley, who is cast as the hero as well as a local reporter. It was one of those cheaply made films that was a time 'filler' to complement the main A film. The film is not to be taken seriously as a crime story, but more of a homage to the importance of British motorcycles of the early 1950's, when buying a car was out of the financial reach of most working class young men, whereas the average young bloke could aspire to becoming liberated by buying a Triumph or Norton motorbike and thus enjoy the freedom which the countryside had to offer. Motor bikes and youth in the 50's would be forever associated with the young American rebel leader, Marlon Brando, terrorising a town with his gang in 'The Wild One.' This film couldn't be further away from rebellious, 'angry young men' as Jimmy Hanley is the very epitome of modesty, honesty and respectability. His 'eager to please' character provides no menace or edge. Indeed. Hanley's jolly character and his very proper and cosy relationship with Rona Anderson, marks him down as a young man every prospective mother would want their daughter to wed. The film itself reveals a forgotten 1950's world of a quintessentially quiet British coastal town, with the pub as its social hub, where local folk were respectful, warm hearted, and where violence, crudity and sexual innuendos were conspicuous by their absence!

The Black Rider is directed by Wolf Rilla and written by A.R. Rawlinson. It stars Jimmy Hanley, Rona Anderson, Leslie Dwyer, Lionel Jeffries, Beatrice Varley and Micahel Golden. Music is by Wilfred Burns and cinematography by Geoffrey Faithful.

There's a grand line of British movies involving smugglers/gun runners that use some supernatural legend to hide their crooked activities. Think The Ghost Train and Will Hay classics like Oh! Mr Porter and Ask A Policenman, and you find it's a splinter of the horror comedy that has been well served in Blighty. The Black Rider carried on this tradition but only with a modicum of success.

Out of Nettlefold Studios, it's by definition a quintessential B movie. It clocks in at just over an hour, is low on production value but oozes the cheap and cheery ambiance that makes it impossible to dislike. Plot basically follows the concept of a small coastal town in awe of a local spook said to haunt the ruins up there on the hill. Cue sightings of said spook (a hooded monk), an investigation of Famous Five type proportions by some straight backed heroes, a snapshot of ye olde Brit village life and low and behold there's some crooks to be snuffed out for a big hooray ending! Throw in a bunch of motorcycle riders and their awesome bikes, though this is no Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and it rounds out as a brisk and amiable time waster; with Rilla showing nice fluid camera work that often belies the low budget afforded the production.

Safe as houses really, or in this case, Brockham Manor! 6/10