The Hurricane Express (1932)

Armand Schaefer, John Wayne, J. P. McGowan, Shirley Grey, Conway Tearle · 1932 · 226 min

A masked saboteur called the Wrecker is derailing trains, and John Wayne — twenty-five, and years away from Stagecoach — wants to know who killed his father. The gimmick is disguise: the Wrecker could be any of a dozen suspects, and the serial cheerfully swaps faces between chapters to keep you guessing. Real trains, real speed, and a young Wayne doing his own running along the tops of moving carriages.

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Public domain in the United States by non-renewal. Published 1932 under the 1909 Act, which required a renewal registration in the 28th year; the scanned Catalog of Copyright Entries motion-picture volumes for 1959–61 contain no renewal of this film (checked 2026-08-17 against the Archive.org scans — method, matches and limits recorded in our verification notes). The check treats OCR absence as strong evidence corroborating the decades-long PD distribution consensus, not as sole proof; final sign-off re-reads the window at torrent-publish time.