THUNDERBOLT (1929)

 

Josef von Sternberg's career can be divided into two phases. He's best known for the period when he was identified with his protege Marlene Dietrich. In the earlier stage, he was identified with George Bancroft. There's a contradiction for someone to reconcile. Sternberg became a star director putting burly Bancroft through his criminal paces in Underworld, and starred him again in his seedy romance The Docks of New York. He depended on Bancroft, who had since become the Wolf of Wall Street, to put over his talkie debut. Sternberg reportedly wanted to work as creatively with soundscapes as he had worked with images, and you can hear that in Thunderbolt's diegetic soundtrack and in occasional thematic devices like a sort of hyena laugh that hovers in the atmosphere of the Black Cat nightclub. Inevitably, however, a Sternberg film works best on the visual level, and to an extent Bancroft's voice limits this one. Most of the time he has an unusually smooth delivery as the title character, a gangster named for his lethal punch, but as I've noticed in other Bancroft talkies, the star has a bad habit of slowing...his lines...down...very...deliberately in his big dramatic moments, to the point that you can imagine him intoning the infamous "Take him ... for ... a ride" line from Lights of New York. That's a shame because Bancroft gives an interesting performance overall as a rather peculiar gangster.

 

Above: Thunderbolt enters the Black Cat.

Below: Fay Wray as the woman Thunderbolt has lost, and 

Theresa Harris as the dream of another possibility.

 

What's peculiar about Jim Lang is his detachment, or his ability to detach himself from his concerns to dwell in moments of pleasure or play. You notice how he hangs out at the Black Cat, apparently an integrated nightclub with black entertainers, and how he lingers before leaving to take in the uncredited Theresa Harris's song, "Daddy Won't You Please Come Home?" Sternberg and Bancroft convey Thunderbolt's appreciation of Harris's voice and figure, but just as interesting as his appreciation of black beauty is his readiness to stop everything and enjoy the moment. Later, Jim enters an apartment building to kill Bob Moran (Richard Arlen), the new lover of his erstwhile moll Ritzy (Fay Wray). He's followed inside by a stray mutt from the street that's attached himself to the gangster. Thunderbolt wants to be rid of the yapping dog and tries to attract it back downstairs by getting on all fours, shaking his rump and sliding with a weird smoothness across the carpet. You get the impression that despite his mission of death Jim will take as long getting the pooch's attention as he needs to, that now all that matters is getting that dog to come to him. And as we'll see, he doesn't really want to be rid of the dog at all, even if the dumb animal gets him pinched. Thunderbolt is used to doing whatever he wants, and in moments like these there's an almost endearing modesty to his whims.

 

Above, Thunderbolt acts as virtual executioner for "Bad Al" (Fred Kohler).

Below: Bob confronts his enemy at last.

Inevitably, Thunderbolt is a melodrama typical of its decade. As noted, Thunderbolt wants to destroy Bob, the man he assumes is cuckolding him. Even on death row -- it's unclear what exactly he was convicted of -- he has enough influence to take belated revenge on Moran. He has his men lure Bob to the bank from which he was recently fired -- his relationship with Ritzy came to light and might have harmed the establishment's reputation -- and plant a gun on him while robbing the place. Lives are taken and Bob promptly finds himself on death row across from Thunderbolt, even though you'd think the bank president's testimony would have substantiated Bob's defense that he was lured to the bank by a crank call. Bob is so thoroughly railroaded that he's scheduled to burn before Thunderbolt. Everybody takes for granted (even though no one can prove it in court, presumably) that Thunderbolt framed Bob, but despite entreaties from Ritzy and Bob's mother (Eugenie Besserer, who couldn't be more different from her Jazz Singer mom in a wonderful scene where she and Bob are playfully roughhousing in their bathroom) Jim refuses to fess up. It's only when Ritzy and Bob have a death-house wedding that Thunderbolt relents and admits to the frame. This is where such stories usually end, with the pathos of renunciation as Jim gives up Ritzy once and for all, but Sternberg and the screenwriting Furthman brothers create fresh suspense by having one of Jim's cronies confide that Thunderbolt is still playing a long game. What he really wants, we're told, is a chance to kill Bob with his super punch, which we've already seen knock another con into a coma. To do this, he needs Bob to stay in his cell (while the paperwork for his release is prepared) until the day Jim himself is scheduled to die. Jim will get a chance to shake hands with all his death row playmates, and when it's Bob's turn, POW! Everything leads to a climactic long take that's both corny and brilliant, as Jim and Bob say their farewells while Sternberg calls our attention to Thunderbolt's deadly hand moving from bar to bar of Bob's cell. Then Bob hits Jim with a final revelation: it turns out that he'd been Ritzy's childhood sweetheart, but that Jim had fairly won her away from him until she tired of gang life. This idea tickles Thunderbolt, and he moves on to the death chamber in good humor.

 

Watch that hand, Bob!

What happened here, exactly? There's room to see it two ways. It may be that something about Bob's story made Jim relent, but for all we know that other gangster was talking through his hat and Jim never had any intention to kill Bob after the wedding scene. Conceding some ambiguity makes the moment somewhat less corny, and my overall impression of Jim Lang is that he is too easily amused by things to be as deadly as everyone assumes, and that even his frame-up of Bob is little more than a practical joke. At the very end we leave him laughing at a guard having the name Aloysius. You could almost believe that Thunderbolt is tired of his life without actually realizing it. I may question Bancroft's line readings sometimes, but there's a subtlety to his performance that makes my view of Jim's bemused ambivalence seem plausible. Whatever Sternberg's intentions, Thunderbolt isn't one of his characteristic spectacles, though it is nicely shot. That may be because his camera doesn't really worship Fay Wray the way he'd worship Dietrich, or the way he worships Theresa Harris during her song. In the end, it's Bancroft's imperfect but intriguing performance that makes the film worth seeing.

BLACK MOON (1934)

Roy William Neill's voodoo-rama turned up again this week on TCM, so in the spirit of the month I decided to take a look. I remember reading an article about this movie in Films in Review magazine years ago and had been interested in it ever since. It pretty much lived up to expectations. Neill stages things quite nicely, uses props in the foreground to keep his sets well dressed, and the sets themselves are well designed so he can employ swish pans or move from one level to another. He did equally good work the following year in The Black Room, which boasts Boris Karloff in a dual role, and both these Columbia horrors strike me as better films than his contribution to the Universal mythos, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.

In bare outline, Black Moon anticipates I Walked With A Zombie in making the heroine an aide to a troubled woman under the spell of the Caribbean. But the Columbia film distinguishes itself by making its bewitched female an outright villain. She's Juanita Lane (Dorothy Burgess), who fell under the influence of voodoo when young and has never quite shaken it. The film opens with her playing ominous drums for the supposed entertainment of her young daughter, who'll be set up for her own initiation into voodoo later, or worse. Gail Hamilton (Fay Wray) reluctantly comes along to look after Juanita's daughter and increasingly becomes a surrogate mother figure, especially as she warms to Juanita's estranged husband Stephen (top-billed Jack Holt). The natives of the island of St. Christopher welcome Juanita back, but regard the other whites with suspicion. The only black ally Stephen Lane may have is "Lunch" McClaren (Clarence Muse), a Georgia-born boat captain who feels as superior to the native "monkey chasers" as the whites might. But he ends up stranded on the island with the Lane party as the local voodoo cult re-establishes ties with Juanita, who has an important role to play in an upcoming human sacrifice.

In fact, Juanita's sudden appearance in voodoo garb to perform a dance to the dark gods is a startling moment that drives home how far gone she is. Stephen and Lunch try to abort the sacrifice, the victim being Lunch's native girlfriend, but after Stephen plugs the high priest and both men flee, Juanita herself takes up the sword to finish the bloody work. While the priest is only wounded, it seems like the balance of power is shifting toward Juanita, who leads a siege of the Lane compound with the thought of sacrificing her own husband. But when the good guys manage to escape, the pressure's on Juanita to sacrifice one of her own blood -- her own daughter.

Black Moon is a horror movie that doesn't quite look like a horror film. Unlike The Black Room, this film from Neil does without the usual expressionistic effects or gothic tone we associate with vintage horror. Despite its bigotedly distorted view of voodoo, it aims for a more realistic visual and storytelling style than, say, White Zombie -- the film that most likely inspired Black Moon's production. By Universal standards, Dorothy Burgess probably looks like an underwhelming villain because, apart from the dance, she tends to underplay her part, as if selling that she's in a trancelike state throughout. But she ends up being one of the most troubling characters in pre-Code horror because she gets a moment when motherhood must vie with voodoo for her ultimate loyalty -- and motherhood loses. Skip the next paragraph to avoid a spoiler.

As Black Moon reaches its climax, I was expecting motherhood to win out, which given the situation would mean that the already irredeemable Juanita, having already murdered at least one person, would kill herself rather than sacrifice her daughter. But the spell of voodoo proves too strong, leaving Stephen only one way to save the child -- by killing his own wife. The script could actually have done more to sell how awful a moment this should have been for Stephen, but the writers had little more than an hour to fill, and I don't know if Jack Holt was enough of an actor to sell it. But the thought of how this all plays out is pretty chilling.

Strange to say, but Fay Wray is actually disappointing here; I don't recall whether she screams or not in the picture, but she's never really in individual peril, and that seems like a waste. If you have her in a horror flick it should be her facing sacrifice, but instead she's rather like a spare tire. You know she's going to take Juanita's place in the Lane family, but she has no chemistry with Holt and doesn't have enough conflict with Burgess to earn her second billing. On the other hand, Clarence Muse was a pleasant surprise as Lunch. He had a brief role as a dignified coachman in White Zombie, but here gets one of the more fleshed-out roles for a black actor in this period. Lunch is his own master and as an American is not in thrall to voodoo like the natives, though he rightly fears the pure evil of this film's concept of it. He speaks freely to white folks (though he shuts up when told to) and doesn't chicken out during the siege. Instead, announcing that "The time has come!" he takes a gun and fights alongside Stephen and the local doctor, and his shooting is just as effective as theirs. He's indisputably one of the heroes of the movie.

This isn't the first time I've seen a Columbia programmer on TCM and been impressed by it. It helps a lot that Black Moon looks terrific in a practically pristine print that flatters Joseph August's cinematography. August would go on to great things at RKO, and he really helps this film punch above its weight. Columbia was supposed to be close to Poverty Row in these years, apart from Frank Capra's films, but on the strength of Neill's movies it looks like they treated their experiments in horror as A productions -- or at least they look that way. It deserves a more prominent place in the Thirties horror canon.