Thunderbolt
Screening on Film
With George Bancroft, Fay Wray, Richard Arlen.
US, 1929, 35mm, black & white, 92 min.
Sternberg's second gangster picture again stars George Bancroft as a larger than life mobster, now caught in a fatal love triangle. In his first sound film, Sternberg, like other talented silent flmmakers such as Lang and Hitchcock, was quick to exploit the new technology's unique expressive dimensions - to evoke off-screen action, for example, and maintain a careful "contrapuntal" soundtrack. Thunderbolt also makes masterful use of music performed onscreen, leading Andrew Sarris to call the film "as much a musical as a melodrama."
PRECEDED BY
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The Case of Lena Smith (fragment)
Directed by Joseph von Sternberg.
With Esther Ralston, James Hall.
US, 1929, 35mm, black & white, 5 min.
Preserved by the Theatre Museum of Waseda University, Tokyo
Print source: Austrian Film Museum
Among the many missing films from the 1920s, The Case of Lena Smith looms as one of the most regrettable. Rumored to be most striking of Sternberg’s silent films, The Case of Lena Smith was a tender melodrama that returned to the fin-de-siècle Vienna of his childhood, the same setting that similarly captivated Max Ophuls. The plot concerns the relationship between a young woman and a dissolute soldier, to whom she bears a child and to whose father she ends up in servitude. The recently discovered five-minute sequence from the film, a trip by the film’s lovers to Vienna’s fabled Prater amusement park, will be presented by the renowned archivist, scholar, programmer and film historian Alexander Horwath.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
The Salvation Hunters
The Docks of New York
Underworld
The Last Command
Thunderbolt
