“Like Underworld before it, Thunderbolt is less a gangster film than a gangster fantasy. Its speech is stylized, its noise of gunfire muted. . . . [Sternberg’s first talkie] is, in retrospect, a startling experiment with the kind of asynchronous sound that Eisenstein and Pudovkin were issuing manifestos about at the time” (Andrew Sarris). As in Underworld, the plot involves a triangle with a gangster played by George Bancroft at one of its sharp points. This time Bancroft is Thunderbolt Jim Lang, and Fay Wray is his girl Ritzy, who goes straight—into the arms of bank clerk Richard Arlen—then turns him in. From his jail cell, Thunderbolt manages to frame his rival in a murder plot, and the two meet again on death row.

• Written by Jules Furthman. Photographed by Henry Gerrard. With George Bancroft, Fay Wray, Richard Arlen, Tully Marshall. (92 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Universal)