The Black Rider ** (1954, Jimmy Hanley, Rona Anderson, Leslie Dwyer, Lionel Jeffries, Beatrice Varley, Vincent Ball, Edwin Richfield, Kenneth Connor) – Classic Movie Review 4080

Director Wolf Rilla’s 1954 double-feature thriller starts with an idea as old as the hills about a gang of crooks who are apparently haunting a ruined castle.

Jimmy Hanley stars as the young reporter and amateur biker Jerry Marsh who sets out to catch the crooks with the help of a gang of motorcycle club members. The crooks are plotting a bit of atomic sabotage…

This Butcher’s release is a desperately cheap production and the idea would perhaps have suited Will Hay or Arthur Askey better as a comedy. But director Rilla effectively deploys a bunch of particularly amiable actors and it is all over in a breathless 65 minutes.

Hanley and Rona Anderson, as his faithful pillion rider Mary Plack, are in high spirits as the couple who eventually uncover the nest of enemy agents, who are smuggling atomic bomb parts into England.

In the late Eighties, British TV has rescued this characterful old black and white relic from oblivion.

Also in the cast are Leslie Dwyer, Lionel Jeffries, Beatrice Varley, Vincent Ball, Edwin Richfield, Kenneth Connor, Michael Golden, Valerie Hanson, Robert Rietty, James Raglan, Frank Atkinson, Edie Martin, Peter Swanwick, Sarah Davies, John Pike, Anne Gillens, Andrew Leigh, John Baker and Frank Taylor.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4080

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