Cheap Hurricane Express (1932)

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This is a serial starring John Wayne as an airplane pilot. His airline is competing against his fathers railroad! It is action packed and holds the interest well. The video and sound are both very good. I hate watching old movies with bad sound, this is not one of those.

The Ford Trimotor airplane and the close up views of the train engines are amazing. My wife and I both enjoyed this movie.

Mike Bunkermeister Creek

bunkermeister dot blogspot dot com

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Terrible quality. Scenes are either bleached out (faces are featureless) or too dark. And talk about fuzzy! Vertical lines periodically make an appearance single, multiple, white and black. Audio hisses at the beginning but gets marginally better which isn't saying much as it's so very poor to begin with. At times you can't make out what the actors are saying.

Save your money, folks. Even a die hard John Wayne fan like me feels like a fool for ordering from a company called Passion Productions (a division of PMC Corp). If you can purchase it for 99 cents go ahead but that's all it's worth.

Even if this DVD had been digitally remastered it does not qualify as a classic. It's representative of similar movies from the early 1930's, which makes it interesting, but not a true classic.

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I did not expect a great deal from this 1932 serial, but since I have always been a outspoken John Wayne fan, I looked forward to this DVD. Actually, it really did not surprise or disappoint me much. The production values were cheap, the script weak, and the acting so-so. What I found best about the serial was seeing John Wayne in top athletic form doing a lot of his own stunts, and providing a great deal of action. I noticed that his friend, and stunt teacher, Yakima Canutt, played one of the henchmen, and I am sure that Yak did a lot to boost the action quality of the film.

It is telling that the studio at the time did not even put John Wayne's name above the title. Apprarently, they did not yet recognize his box office potential at this time, or else the studio execs at Fox and Columbia a year or to previously had done a fair job in trying to deep-six his career. It is a shame that Duke Wayne had to toil at these bargain basement studios such as Mascot and Republic for so many years until "Stagecoach" made him a huge star.

Since I did not spend much on the DVD, I shall not rank it badly for its picture and sound quality. But hey, distributors everywhere, we are talking about John Wayne--the most outstanding action star of the talking picture era. One would think that the people who are selling this serial, and other early films of Wayne, would take more pride in the presentation, and try to do a better job in the restoration. I really thought the picture and sound quality could have been improved, so I only rated it with two stars. I still recommend that John Wayne fans see this, and other early 1930s films he did. In seeing these films it will become obvious that no matter how little money was expended, the Duke still emerges as the unparalled hero of the silver screen.

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This is the only DVD I've found that shows the 3 Serials that he did as true serials (12 chapters each)....A MUST for the John Wayne collector! These are not westerns....he plays the part of a pilot in each one, but there is typical John Wayne action involved.

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You have to go way back for this early John Wayne film; The Hurricane Express was actually a serial in 12 parts released in 1932. There aren't any cowboys or horses around for this adventure, but there's plenty of action. A baby-faced John Wayne plays an airplane pilot whose father, a train engineer, is killed when some fiend who calls himself "the Wrecker" causes the Hurricane Express to crash. Larry Baker (Wayne) swears that he will catch the man who killed father, but the Wrecker has a way of escaping time and again this is due largely to the fact that he has a set of incredibly lifelike masks that allow him to pose as any number of characters, including Larry Baker. Baker's lady friend's father was "railroaded" (ahem) and sent to prison for embezzling from the company, and his recent escape puts him high on the list of suspects. Then there is the local airline boss who stands to profit from all of the railroad's troubles. Throw in a number of other likely suspects, and you've got a real riddle on your hands. Talk about action, though. The good guys and bad guys are constantly hopping from trains to cars to airplanes and back again. The very young Duke gets cold-conked on the head so many times I stopped counting, but you know John Wayne can't be stopped. All of this going to and fro, combined with the kind of film quality that naturally applies to a film from 1932, left me a little confused at times, and the whole deal with the masks felt a little Scooby Doo-ish, but overall I found The Hurricane Express a pretty entertaining experience.