Thunderbolt

Josef von Sternberg's first talkie is a gangster picture that spends most of its length waiting for an execution. George Bancroft, nominated for an Academy Award for it, plays Thunderbolt Jim Lang, a robber with one ambition left: to reach the young bank clerk his girl has taken up with, framed into the cell opposite his. Sternberg treats sound the way he treats light, rationing it and placing it. On the row, listen to how the music between the cells, and the long silences around it, carry the hours before a hanging. Fay Wray plays Ritzie, four years before King Kong. Herman Mankiewicz wrote the dialogue, twelve years before Citizen Kane.