Josef von Sternberg's Thunderbolt (1929)

I made my first sound film, Thunderbolt, in 1929.  It was treated with respect at the box office, but, with one exception, not a single soul noticed my attempt to put sound into its popular relation with the image.
--Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (Martin Secker and Warburg Limited, 1967).

Thunderbolt, like von Sternberg's earlier Underworld (1927) became something of a template for the many gangster movies that followed it.  George Bancroft plays a ruthless gangster whose heart is won by Fay Wray and a stray dog.  On his way to the electric chair Bancroft discovers that Wray's lover Richard Arlen, framed by Bancroft for murder, was Arlen's lover  before Bancroft arrived on the scene, and Bancroft walks calmly to his death.

Not only is Thunderbolt, like all von Sternberg films, a masterpiece of light and shadow, it is also innovative in its use of sound, adding sound outside the frame as a door opens or as a man walks to his death in the electric chair.  von Sternberg continued this use of sound in his later talkies, though only in his penultimate film, Anatahan (1954), did it reach the complexity of Thunderbolt.

von Sternberg is best-known for his films with Marlene Dietrich, starting with The Blue Angel in 1930, but in his earlier films (see my post about The Docks of New York, July 9 of this year) he portrays women in similar complicated and mysterious ways, as he does with Fay Wray in Thunderbolt, interrogated by the police as she sits above them, swathed in furs.  Thunderbolt also has an unusually sympathetic view of African-Americans, as musicians and patrons of a nightclub as well as convicts in prison.