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).
