Thunderbolt (1929)
Directed by Josef von Sternberg

Film Review

Immediately before making Der blaue Engel (1930), his most famous film, director Josef von Sternberg came to grips with the challenges of early sound cinema with this offbeat gangster melodrama.   The problems posed by the early sound recording equipment defeated many a filmmaker in the late 20s, early 30s, but von Sternberg fully embraced the opportunities afforded by this new cinematic development to enhance the movie-going experience.  The sound highlights include a scene in a busy Harlem nightspot, in which swinging cabaret numbers add greatly to the seedy atmosphere, and the later sequences in the prison, where convicts sing in chorus to counterpoint the horror of their predicament.

The film is also interesting visually.  With its use of high contrast black and white photography and omnipresent shadows, the film presages the film noir thriller.  The one sequence of particular interest is the one in which the principal baddie, Lang, ascends the staircase to confront his rival.  The noirish lighting transforms the staircase into a spider's web in which Lang becomes enmeshed and incapable of carrying out his deadly plan.  The same visual motif recurs in the prison scenes, but this time Lang and his rival are both caught, like flies in a spider's web, awaiting a cruel end.

Sadly, there are also a great deal of weaknesses.  The plot is as unconvincing and amateurish as most of the performances, and some of the characterisation is just too wacky to be taken seriously.  The prison warden looks and acts as if thinks he is doing a Marx Brothers picture, something which completely ruins the tension of the last few scenes.  Fay Wray is so jarring that, at times, you wish that some giant hairy ape would turn up and carry her away, but alas that did not happen until four years later (in King Kong).   Despite his limited acting range, George Bancroft carries the film almost singlehandedly, although his delivery is so slow that you soon become convinced that the film is being played at half its intended speed.   Today, Thunderbolt is a creaky patience-testing plod-a-thon, but at the time it represented a major advancement in the use of sound and lighting in a motion picture.

Film Synopsis

Nicknamed Thunderbolt, Jim Lang is a hardened gangster who is hotly pursued by the police for a series of crimes that include robbery and murder.  He risks capture by confronting his girlfriend Ritzy in a Harlem nightclub.  She has made up her mind to leave him, but he has no intention of letting her go.  When he learns that Ritzy has moved in with her new boyfriend, a respectable young man named Bob Morgan, Lang decides to settle the matter man-to-man with his rival.  Before he can reach Bob's apartment, the crook is caught by the police and soon ends up on death-row, having been convicted of murder.  Lang's cronies successfully frame Bob for an armed bank robbery and it isn't long before Bob is occupying a cell opposite Lang's.  Ritzy pleads with Lang to confess to having framed Bob so that he can evade the electric chair.  Lang is unrepentant and relishes the fact that his rival will share the same fate as him...