Edward G. Robinson’s rare British film: remembering 1930s fish-out-of-water drama Thunder in the City

In September 1962, the Sunday Express reported on the presence of a fading Hollywood star in London. “Once he could not have stepped into a London street without being mobbed,” the article said. “Now at 8.30 on a busy morning in Oxford Street, no one pays the slightest attention to him. Who is he, this man with a beard who goes unnoticed in the crowd? He was once the greatest screen tough guy of them all.” 

The former ‘tough guy’ was Edward G. Robinson, in Britain to film the studio scenes for Sammy Going South (Alexander Mackendrick, 1963), after a gruelling location shoot in Kenya.

It was a different story when, quarter of a century earlier, Robinson came to England to make his first British film, Thunder in the City. The press greeted his arrival on 22 June 1936 with excitement, and he took part in BBC radio broadcasts before shooting at Denham began the following month. Frustrated with his career at Warner Brothers, he had been released for a deal with Atlantic Film Productions, set up by Hungarian writer-director Alexander Esway.

Travelling on the Normandie from New York, Robinson had the company of fellow Romanian Aben Kandel, co-author of the script of Thunder in the City. Kandel found Robinson “warm, funny and generous – you couldn’t have found a better guy”, but while the star was outwardly friendly, he was less than impressed with Kandel’s writing and found the script flat and silly. Luckily, on arrival in London he ran into Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robert E. Sherwood, who was at a loose end and persuaded him to work his magic on Thunder in the City, transforming it, according to Robinson, from “idiot comedy into subtle wit”.

In the film, Robinson plays brash American marketing man Dan Armstrong, sent to England to tone down his over-the-top sales techniques. While there he tracks down his long-lost relatives, the aristocratic but impoverished Duke and Duchess of Glenavon, and tries to help them gain financial stability using his sharp selling tactics. Along the way, his down-to-earth warmth and openness attract a raft of friends and win him the hand of Lady Patricia, daughter of the Glenavons.

Esway’s distribution guarantees from Columbia had enabled him to bring over ex-pat British actors Nigel Bruce and Constance Collier to play Armstrong’s highborn relatives, who appear alongside Ralph Richardson in the impressive all-star cast.

Endowing the film with feminine appeal are two very different actresses. British revue star Nancy Burne is vivacious as the fun-loving street singer befriended by Armstrong, while sultry Viennese actress Luli Deste brings a continental allure to the role of Lady Patricia.

The film’s pressbook bursts with so much hyperbolic hoopla, it could have been written by Armstrong himself. “Glamorous, exotic, a brilliant actress, Miss Deste will send your patrons from the theatre discussing her with excitement,” it boasted. Patrons may well have been discussing Miss Deste after seeing the film, but perhaps with more confusion than excitement, since they might have wondered why Lady Patricia is hampered by a heavy Austrian accent.

This somewhat inappropriate casting is perhaps explained by director Marion Gering’s conviction that this daughter of an aristocrat was destined to be the next Marlene Dietrich. After Thunder in the City, Gering returned to Hollywood with Deste under contract and, in February 1937, The Central New Jersey Home News reported that the actress (“5 feet 4 inches tall… 110 pounds… she has blue eyes and dark brown hair… and three black Afghan hounds”) was searching for the right story for her American debut. The ‘right story’ was never found and, after some lacklustre roles, including Queen Fria in a Flash Gordon serial, Deste made her last film, a B-western, in 1941.

It seems that elegance and striking looks did not guarantee film stardom, and Deste’s limited acting skills let her down. A review of Thunder in the City described her as “one of the most camera-conscious young ladies ever to appear on the local screen; you can almost see the reflection of the sound crew in her very pretty eyes”.

But Deste found celebrity in other ways. She married German inventor Paul Kollsman, and, in 1946, posed for Salvador Dalí’s Portrait of Luli Kollsman, in which she appears as a small figure in a surreal desert landscape, with one of her beloved Afghan hounds for company. In 1949 she published a novel called Come, Take My Hand, which was, according to the New York Times critic, “most likely to leave readers insensible upon the floor”.

Nancy Burne had been a professional stage performer since the age of 14, with several film roles under her belt. Despite Esway sending her for a promotional photo shoot, she’s not mentioned at all in the press material, and barely features in reviews. This is surprising, as her tremendous energy and screen presence leave a greater impression than Deste’s rather flat performance.

These two very different actresses later turned out to have one thing in common: they both died young. Deste passed away in 1951, aged 48, while Burne succumbed to a long illness in 1954, at just 41. Burne’s obituary included the enigmatic phrase “she never married”, making one wonder if the ‘Gwen Newman’ who subsequently posted annual tributes to her in The Stage was more than a friend.

Thunder in the City was released in March 1937 and got some encouraging reviews, such as Kine Weekly’s: “There is a rich vein of satire in the clever, neatly balanced story, and this is joyously expressed through the keenness of the direction and the vital and resourceful acting of Edward G. Robinson.” 

Graham Greene, however, was unimpressed, bemoaning the film’s “complete ignorance of… English life and behaviour”. Perhaps cinemagoers agreed with him, as the film was a financial disaster and Atlantic Film Productions folded, leaving debts of nearly £59,000.

While the presence of Hollywood royalty wasn’t enough to guarantee box office success, it did give the film an extended life, and it was re-released several times in the 1940s. For some years, this heavily cut re-release version was the only element held by the BFI National Archive, but, in 1990, the full-length original was donated by Columbia. The following year, a duplicate negative was made from this, along with a 35mm viewing copy, which can be accessed by researchers and cinemas keen to experience Robinson’s wonderfully spirited performance in his first British film.

This rare British film is preserved in the BFI National Archive. It can be viewed upon request via our research viewing service. Special Collections items can be viewed by appointment at the J Paul Getty Jr Conservation Centre in Berkhamsted.