Although Thunderbolt may never rank with Docks of New York in the Sternberg hall of fame (where every critic seems to place a different film anyway), it deserves to be more often revived as a classic of the early sound film, in which a brilliant director exploited the dramatic possibilities of the new medium. Our print is a recent UCLA Film Archives restoration. Aural images, such as a frenetic nightclub scene using multiple sources of sound, remain in the memory long after the story-itself a kind of classic, telling of a gangster and a bank clerk in love with the same girl-fades away. George Bancroft is the gangster, Thunderbolt Jim Lang, whose girl "Ritzy" (Fay Wray) goes straight-into the arms of bank clerk Richard Arlen-then turns him in. From his jail cell, Thunderbolt manages to frame his rival in a murder plot and the two meet again on death row.