Sternberg’s rarely-screened first talking film is a strange example of the gangster trend he started with Underworld and The drag net (a lost film today), all starring george bancroft. Andrew Sarris: “Like Underworld before it, Thunderbolt is less a gangster film than a gangster fantasy. It is a startling experiment with the kind of asynchronous sound that Eisenstein and Pudovkin were issuing manifestos about at the time. The very unreality of his sound seems to justify the unusual density of his sound track… George Bancroft’s superhuman anticipation of death is the stuff of grand opera. ” thunderbolt also gives us music – superb black nightclub performers near the beginning, and later, after Thunderbolt (Bancroft) is on death row, fellow-prisoners harmonize blues songs and standards. The spare story, the unrealistic cadence of the dialog, bancroft’s out- bursts of physical menace, hearty laughter and hairgone wild s the college athlete look of his romantic rival, George Arlen, defended by his 1930s-style mother, keep tilting the mood off-balance, leading to one of Sternberg’s many unlikely endings