Josef von Sternberg (director) THUNDERBOLT [1929] Photo archive

Paramount. No binding. Just About Fine. [Los Angeles]: Paramount Pictures, [1929]. Set of 12 vintage original 8 x 10" (20 x 25 cm) black-and-white photos, one with mimeographed text on verso, three with the film's title stamped on verso, overall just about fine. Josef von Sternberg's first talking film. Some historians credit his importance in the evolution of gangster films with his UNDERWORLD (1927). This was by any standard the first significant talking gangster film. It tells the story of a criminal, facing execution, who wants to kill the man in the next cell for being in love with his former girlfriend. Sternberg experimented with asynchronous sound effects which served to augment or supplement the visual effects, or as he framed the process, "To be correctly and effectively used, the sound had to bring to the image a quality other than what the lens included, a quality out of the range of the image. Sound had to counterpoint or compensate for the image, add to it – not subtract from it." Rather than the external and complementary musical accompaniment of silent films, Sternberg's scores arise organically with the mise-en-scène and form a key component of the film. The music off-screen does not recede in deference to the on-screen dialogue, but competes with it. Off-screen, voices comment on the visual action, but are not identified visually until later in the film sequence, contributing to an "unrealistic cadence" that characterizes the film's dialogue. Film historian Andrew Sarris describes it as "a startling experiment... his use of sound and music for mood effects, and the very unreality of his style seems to justify the unusual density of his sound track." Sternberg also uses sound expressionistically, such as the erratic start-stop of a sewing machine or the "sinister" squeaking of a dog's ball toy, squeezed by the condemned criminal in the hours before his death. (Wikipedia)