The Wrecker

This a comedy thriller but it isn't funny and doesn't thrill.However it is of interest.First of course the train crash which is quite spectacular.Secondly for the views of everyday England in the twenties,not so different from today.Thirdly because the film was made on the cusp of sound.It had a score and we hear the villains voice in an incriminating recording of a telephone conversation.Clearly Gainsborough were trying to make this film acceptable to an audience who wanted nothing but talkies.One of the big problems of a film such as this was the number of interrupted required.It does become rather tiresome.

A bus company is sabotaging a train line with the aim of discrediting the rail comapany and taking over the route. After a couple of deadly 'accidents', the managing director Sir Gerald Bartlett (Winter Hall) hires his nephew (Joesph Striker) who was involved in one of the accident's to investigate what is behind the crashes.

Based off a play of the same name by Arnold Ridley (better known as Private Godfrey in DAD's ARMY) and Bernard Merivale, it is very much a companion piece to Ridley's better known play, 'The Ghost Train'. One of the screenwriter's who adapted the play was Angus MacPhail who would go on to be one of the leading screenwriters in the 1930s and 40s in popular British cinema, including the 1931 version of THE GHOST TRAIN.

The film is best known for its spectacularly staged railway crash which was filmed outside Alton on a disused railway line, which would 8 years after this be the location for the Will Hay classic, OH, MR PORTER!, a film that would also draw in elements of Ridley's 'The Ghost Train'. Other than the crash, the film is otherwise undistinguished. THE WRECKER was co-produced by Michael Balcon and Arnold Pressburger and directed by a Hungarian, Géza von Bolváry who made the majority of his films in Germany and Austria, even under Nazism. THE WRECKER would also form the basis of an American B picture, THE PHANTOM EXPRESS (1932).

Someone is wrecking the passenger trains, and people are getting killed. Worse, the rail companies are losing money. Happily for them, cricketeer Joseph Striker is retiring from the game to become a director of his uncle's rail company. It hasn't been hit yet, but he and his uncle's secretary, Benita Hume try to figure out who the bad guy is. She works hard and comes up with a lot, while he wanders around and finds himself at the right place at the right time.

A spectacular wreck was staged for this by Southern Railway, using old cars. Otherwise, it's all rather transparent, as the amateur detectives figure it out not long after the audience is shown the villain of the piece lusting after and giving orders to henchwoman Pauline Johnson. Train crashes aside, it's well shot and edited, but more interesting as a sort of intersectional movie: Carlyle Blackwell, a big star of the 1910s is in it -- he would retire from the screen the following year -- as well as up-and-comers like Miss Hume and Gordon Harker.

The 25 year old Angus MacPhail made his lucky break in this silent film where he adapted a play for the screen. It was the same sort of thing that Alfred Hitchcock was doing at the time and their paths would eventually meet over a decade later.