The way the Internet Movie Database tells it, two pairs of writerly brothers worked with Josef von Sternberg on his first talkie, Thunderbolt (1929), recently released on a Kino Lorber Blu-ray (with a knowledgeable audio commentary by Nick Pinkerton that I’ve so far only sampled). Charles and Jules Furthman are both credited for “story,” though Jules, the younger of the two, gets a screen credit for the actual script; Herman J. Mankiewicz is credited for “dialogue,” while his younger brother, Joseph L., is credited for “titles.”
The question is: What titles? The Thunderbolt that I’ve seen and heard many times has none and needs none. Yet according to the American Film Institute’s online catalogue, there was also a silent version of the film—clearly one more missing Sternberg silent, along with The Exquisite Sinner (1926), the Chaplin-produced A Woman of the Sea (1926), The Dragnet (1928), and The Case of Lena Smith (1929), albeit one I’ve never heard mentioned before now.
John Grierson, one of the few people who saw , concluded that “When a director dies, he becomes a photographer”—a verdict that I doubt Stanley Kubrick would have agreed with, although I’m sure that treating Sternberg strictly as a photographer and visual artist has led to the unwarranted critical downgrading of both , his first sound film, and (1955), his last (and a far greater achievement). As an effort to compensate for this neglect, I once even expressed a preference for over his “official” gangster classic (1927), after conceding that the former qualifies in some respects as a half-baked remake of the latter. Re-seeing more recently has cured me of this foolishness, but I think it nevertheless deserves more attention than it’s received, if only for its multifaceted weirdness and its place in Sternberg’s George Bancroft/big-lug period, comprising and (both 1928) along with and (not to mention the Continental versions of this character portrayed by Emil Jannings in [1928] and [1930]). This neglected phase of the director’s work, which provoked the passionate enthusiasm of Jorge Luis Borges during his days as a young film reviewer, could be seen as a tribute to Sternberg’s father (a former soldier and, is neatly echoed by Dietrich’s proud exit as a pseudonymous Mata Hari greeting the firing squad at the end of (1931).
