Thunderbolt (Paramount, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband came home about halfway through Tight Spot and we ended up watching yet another movie, one I had recently ordered because I was startled to see it had actually made it to a home-video format (a Blu-Ray from the redoutable Kino Lorber enterprise): Thunderbolt, a 1929 crime drama from Paramount and Josef von Sternberg’s first sound film. Sternberg had started his film career in 1925 with The Salvation Hunters, about a group of lowlifes eking out a living on a barge. It was at a time before the coming of sound, when making an independent movie was relatively easy to do; all you needed was a camera, some actors, some interesting locations and a director with an eye for dramatic lighting and composition, and Sternberg had all four. Charlie Chaplin saw the film and hired Sternberg to direct a film called The Woman of the Sea starring his former leading lady, Edna Purviance, in an attempt to resuscitate her career (while he pulled the female lead from The Salvation Hunters, Georgia Hale, and made her his co-star in one of his greatest films, The Gold Rush), but he decided it was too weak to release. Sternberg got a contract from MGM but got fired in the middle of making a movie called The Exquisite Sinner (he was yet one more individualistic director who couldn’t hack MGM’s factory-like production system).

Paramount picked him up and assigned him to finish a movie called Children of Divorce with Clara Bow and Gary Cooper, and given the amount of script he still had to shoot and the limited time he had available he decreed that for the rest of the shoot the cast and the crew would literally live at the studio, sleeping on cots and grabbing whatever rest, and whatever food, they could get when they weren’t actually needed on camera. The actors ended up hating him but the film was a success, and so Paramount’s production chief, B. P. Schulberg (father of writer Budd Schulberg, who based his anti-Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run? on the man who forced his dad out of that job, Emmanuel Cohen) assigned him to a movie called Underworld based on a story by Ben Hecht, one of a number of writers who had started out as journalists covering organized crime in Chicago in the 1920’s and then got called by Hollywood to write screenplays about it. Underworld set the template for the gangster movie as a genre and made stars of Sternberg and its leading actors, George Bancroft and Evelyn Brent. Sternberg followed it up with The Last Command, starring Emil Jannings (billed by Paramount as “the world’s greatest actor” following his international triumphs in the films The Last Laugh and Variety) as a Czarist Russian general who, after the 1917 Revolution, ends up in Hollywood making a movie about the Revolution directed by the Bolshevik (William Powell) who had him arrested and exiled; and The Docks of New York, which starred Bancroft as a dock worker who rescues a woman from suicide and then feels responsible for her.

Then sound came in, and Sternberg returned to gangsters as a theme in Thunderbolt, this time casting George Bancroft as bank robber and killer Jim Lang, nicknamed “Thunderbolt” by criminal associates, crime reporters and, ultimately, the police. The film opens with Thunderbolt’s ex-girlfriend, whom he calls “Ritzie” even though her actual name is “Mary” (yet another example of screenwriters – in this case Charles and Jules Furthman, with Sternberg and Herman J. Mankiewicz providing additional dialogue and Mankiewicz’ brother Joe credited with writing titles, presumably for the alternative silent version issued to theatres that still hadn’t wired for sound – using the Mother of Christ’s name to denote a particularly innocent and “virginal” female character) and who’s played by Fay Wray, on a date with a young bank teller named Bob Moran (Richard Arlen) who lives at home with his mother (Eugenie Besserer, also Al Jolson’s mother in the pioneering sound film The Jazz Singer but looking oddly younger here). The opening shot shows Bob and Mary necking in a park – and Sternberg has a black cat walk past them to indicate that they’re going to have some pretty severe troubles on their way to a happy ending. Their main problem is Thunderbolt, who doesn’t take rejection very well; he’s sworn to get Ritzie back to him by any means necessary, and also to kill the man who had the temerity to take her away from him. The two lovers part uncertainly, not wanting to be seen together for fear one of Thunderbolt’s agents will report back to him, and Mary gets into a cab – only what she thinks is a cab is really a police van.

Then we get a scene that seemed to anticipate the central plot of Tight Spot, the movie from 26 years later which we’d just seen: the ex-girlfriend of a mobster being browbeaten by police and prosecutors trying to get a line on Thunderbolt’s whereabouts so they can arrest him. Fay Wray’s performance is one of the highlights of this film; she usually got cast as innocent ingenues but here she’s a tough, hard-boiled broad, wanting to be rid of Thunderbolt but either too loyal to him, too scared of him, or both to want to talk. The first half of the film is about Thunderbolt’s ham-handed attempts to get Mary/Ritzie back, including taking her to a Black cabaret where he starts a fight by squirting an obnoxious woman with a seltzer bottle and getting her companion mad at him. (Intriguingly, Sternberg has the club’s singer heard on the soundtrack but we don’t get to see her, Theresa Harris, until Thunderbolt and Mary are thrown out of the club – and the band behind her is Curtis Mosby’s Blue Blowers, the top Black jazz band in Los Angeles and therefore a go-to group for moviemakers needing a Black band for a film scene.) Thunderbolt traces Bob – who’s already lost his bank job because the bank manager gave him an ultimatum, either end his relationship with a bank robber’s girlfriend or leave, and he left (he has a rather blasé attitude towards losing his job, but then this film was released June 20, 1929, four months before the stock market crash that kicked off the worldwide Great Depression, so this is still a 1920’s rather than a 1930’s Zeitgeist movie) – and goes to the apartment building where Mary is staying (platonically) with him and his mom.

But his attempt to kill her is blocked by a neighborhood dog, whom Thunderbolt can’t get out of his way – Bancroft resorts to going on all fours and playing with the dog in what was clearly Sternberg’s idea of a comic relief sequence, albeit a grim one reflecting the movie’s overall cynicism) – and he’s finally arrested by the police, who happen on him while he’s still stuck with that damned dog. The second half of Thunderbolt takes place on Death Row, where Thunderbolt has been sent after being convicted and sentenced to death, and what’s been a competent and reasonably interesting gangster movie up until now becomes even better. The main intrigue of the second part of the film is Thunderbolt’s determination to get Bob Moran killed even though he’s facing execution himself, and he goes about that by having his gang members write Bob a phony letter, ostensibly from the bank manager who rired him, offering him a meeting presumably to discuss reinstatement, then robbing the bank themselves at the precise time Bob is going to be there, shooting a police officer and planting the gun on Bob so he’ll be accused of the murder, convicted of it and sentenced to death himself. Eventually Thunderbolt has a crisis of conscience and decides to confess the truth to the warden, but his gang members are so convinced Thunderbolt wants Bob dead they assume it’s merely a trick so Thunderbolt and Bob will be out of their cells at the same time and Thunderbolt can shiv him to death – and Sternberg and his writers keep us in suspense until the very end whether Thunderbolt means to murder Bob at the last minute or is letting him go free and back to Mary at the end.

Once the film gets to Death Row, Sternberg and his writers ramp up the cynicism big-time – and Sternberg was apparently as cynical off-screen as he was in his movie. When a Paramount executive asked him to put in some musical numbers because in the early days of sound just about every movie had at least some musical elements, Sternberg said, “Fine. I’ll have a Black convict singing spirituals on Death Row.” That’s just what he did – only he went even farther. Not only did he have a Black convict singing spirituals (and accompanying himself on a piano delivered to his cell by special dispensation of the prison warden – played by Tully Marshall, the only person in this cast besides Fay Wray who worked for both Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg, as a harried bureaucrat instead of the cadaverous figure of evil he was in Stroheim’s The Merry Widow and Queen Kelly), he has some of the white prisoners organize a barber-shop quartet. When Thunderbolt arrives on Death Row one of the barber-shop quartet members asks him if he sings tenor – “I kill tenors,” he says – and they explain that their previous tenor’s death sentence has just been carried out and they need to replace him. There’s even an inmate orchestra that assembles whenever there’s an execution and plays background music as the prisoner is led to the death chamber. (This was at a time when producers frowned on the whole idea of background music, thinking it was an out-of-date holdover from the silent era, so the only way you could have music in your movie was if it was “sourced” – if it came from a live band, a radio, a record or some other visible source. Sternberg remained reticent about background music even after it became standard in sound films: one of his most effective scenes, the ending of his 1930 film Morocco, is scored only with the drums of the French regiment, the natural noises it would make marching into the desert, and the sounds of the sandstorm: no music.)

Technically, Thunderbolt is very much a movie of its time – Sternberg didn’t ride herd on the actors and sound people as much as some of the other early sound directors (notably Vidor, Mamoulian, Milestone and Capra) did, and though Thunderbolt is relatively free of the maddening pauses between lines that afflicted too many early talkies, it’s still a highly stentorian movie. George Bancroft seems to have thought that he’d project menace by speaking his lines slowly and ominously – a far cry from later gangster stars like Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, who spat out their lines at near-warp speed and often snarled them – and Richard Arlen, who become an accomplished sound film actor later, still seems to be finding his sea legs and learning how to act with his voice as well as his face and body. At the same time, Thunderbolt is so cynical in its overall depiction of the criminal justice system and the complexity of its characters it almost seems like a 1960’s movie. I have a boxed set of Sternberg’s last three silents on order and after Thunderbolt I look forward to seeing them at long last (Underworld in particular is one of those movies I’ve heard about literally for decades without ever having had the chance to see), and I had thought of waiting on Thunderbolt until I could show Charles and I its silent predecessors, but I was too curious to want to wait and I ran Thunderbolt immediately – and it’s an intriguing film that marked the end of that phase of Sternberg’s career. The next year he’d travel to Germany on a one-film deal with the big UFA studio and make The Blue Angel, which was supposed to be Emil Jannings’ comeback picture after Paramount had fired “the world’s greatest actor” because they didn’t think he could speak English well enough (and I’ve long suspected there was a certain amount of I’ll-show-them in Jannings’ decision to play a professor teaching an English-as-a-foreign-language class to German students), only instead of Jannings’ performance as a professor ruined by falling in love with a cabaret entertainer, the player they remembered was Marlene Dietrich as the girl who ruined him.