Thunderbolt looks very much like an attempt to repeat the highly successful formula of Underworld. But where the earlier film had a triangle situation as three-dimensional as a pyramid based in the curious sort of love affair between the brutish Bull Weed and the gentle, courteously ironic Rolls-Royce …, Thunderbolt operates from a much simpler, more Hollywooden premise which leaves no place for the ambivalent moralities of Sternberg's world…. Clearly conscious of [a] shallowness in the characterisation, Sternberg tries to compensate by elaborating a cat (the mysterious lure of the underworld) and a dog (tranquil domesticity) as symbols of the emotional dilemma: a symbolism which eventually identifies Thunderbolt with the dog (dumb devotion), and would have been more effective, as well as more in keeping with twilight Sternbergian ethics, had Ritzy the cat been allowed to retain a hint of feline equivocation. Although it looks terrific, shot with all...