Menschen am Sonntag

Marvellous late German silent that anticipates the Italian neo-realists, although I note some claim that this is not realistic at all and may even be showing struggling Berlin through rose tinted glasses. I'm not sure; those fantastic city sequences seem real enough and perhaps the regularly intoned opinion that Hitler was lurking in the shadows of a dispirited people, is itself a little fanciful. In any event this is a great little film filled with fantastic shots, moving street shots of and from moving trams, poetic close-ups of the young folk and a great sense of landscape at the lakeside. As usual with me and silent movies, I seem to get captions I don't need because the action is so obvious and whole sequences of back and forth dialogue left untitled. But just to watch the imagery is good enough and the little trysts, arguments, upsets and loving looks need no titles at all.

Some of the people commenting on this movies mention the fact that it was made only three years before Hitler came to power. While this is true, it is a historical misunderstanding to think that in 1929, when the film was conceived and shot, Hitler was inevitably looming at the political horizon in Germany. In fact, in the Weimar republic of the late 20s there was good reason to believe, that the worst was over for Germany after the chaotic post-WWI-period. The economy had somewhat stabilized, the political circumstances were still chaotic, but I guess people had grown accustomed to the fact that the government changed every so often. Germany was not a democracy in the truest sense of the word, but there was a thriving lower-middle class, and that is what the people in the film are meant to represent. There was good reason to believe, that these people would be typical of Germany at this time. To think that the film makers were delusional about the true state of the German state is a judgement that comes out of knowing what happened later.

Thats what makes this film even more special in my thinking. It shows that there could have been potentially another Germany, and that fascism was not the inevitable consequence of the social condition in the early 30s, German national character or what so ever. In fact, I think thats why this master piece is not as well-known as it deserves to be. It does not fit the bill of 1920s Mabuse-style Germany, where Caligari was an early warning of the Nosferatu was the blue-print of a coming dictator etc, all this Kracauer stuff.

Having said that, I would like to point out two additional things about this film, that make it unique. First of all, with its on-location shot, its amateur actors and its next-to-nothing ,yet social realist story, it is a rare fore-runner of the post-war cinema of Italy etc, that has not acknowledged. (Then again, Rosselini et al never saw this film, but then again, where is the "neo" in "neo-realism" coming from.) It also seems to me that this might very likely be the first "indie" movie. "Indie" is of course a very vague term, and what is called "Independent cinema" differs greatly depending on where the critic is coming from. But I personally know of no other movie, that actually made it into the movie houses, that was produced by a handful of non-pros without the support of a studio. Of course, there are the surrealist films etc, but this was a reasonably successful film, not some art experiment. This is a very daring thesis, I know, but so far nobody was able to prove me wrong....

In France ,Marcel Carné released his first film ,a short ,at about the same time:it was called "Nogent ou l'Eldorado du Dimanche" and it depicted the Parisians' life ,leaving the city for the banks of the Marne river ,spending a wonderful sunny day,then waiting for the next Sunday...

Carné's work was only a short (15 min) whereas Siodmak/Ulmer's film is about one hour and a quarter long.But the subject is the same.The main difference lies in the fact that,being much longer,the script writers could introduce characters .As an user has already pointed out,its games of love and jealousy in the sun ,the picnic and the pedal boat predate Jean Renoir's "Une Partie de Campagne" by six years.But Maupassant's short story was then and "Menschen am Sonntag" is now.Its documentary side is absorbing and should appeal to historians.

With "Menschen" ,a great director,too often forgotten or overlooked,Siodmak was born.Almost everything the man directed -not only the mind-boggling film noirs of the forties but the French ones ("Mister Flow" "Mollenard" "Pièges" ) and the German ones (this one,"Stürme der Leidenschaft" "Brennendes Geheimnis") as well- demands to be watched.

Five non-professional actors star in this tale of a typical Sunday idyll in and around Berlin. We meet taxi driver Erwin Splettstober, wine salesman Wolfgang von Waltershausen, music store clerk Brigitte Borchert, film extra Christl Ehlers, and model Annie Schreyer, attractive young people who are looking to relax on a sunny Sunday. The first four travel out to the country for a frolic in and around a lake, during which romantic attachments are formed and lost. This is cut together with documentary footage of average German citizens enjoying their Sunday in various ways.

This hard-to-classify effort has a stellar line-up behind the scenes: Billy Wilder and Curt Siodmak worked on the screenplay, the direction was by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, and an uncredited Fred Zinnemann worked on various aspects of the movie, as well. The cinematography, although primitive and obvious in its trickery (I'm thinking of the often reflected light creating a sun-dappled effect on the actors' faces), has a modernity and immediacy seldom seen in films of the time. I think my favorite sequence of the film was a montage of close-up faces, of all shapes and sizes, of people around the lake. Recommended.

This silent semi-documentary boasts quite a remarkable roster of young talent behind the camera: Billy Wilder, writing his first screenplay; Curt and Robert Siodmak at the helm, aided by contributions from Edgar G. Ulmer and Fred Zinnemann – all of them still in their twenties, all at the beginning of notable careers. The most interesting aspect in front of the camera is the shots of everyday life in Berlin immediately before Adolf Hitler's meteoric rise to power. Many of the people you see going about their ordinary, everyday lives – including possibly the young leads – will have participated in the war into which Hitler would plunge their country in nine short years – or been consigned to concentration camps from which they'd never emerge.

The plot is virtually non-existent: a couple of young men take a couple of young girls to the park for a little frolicking in the lake (and something a little more intense for one couple). The characters are curiously remote, making it difficult for the audience to get to know – or like – them. They are no heroes or villains as such – although there is an air of callousness about the men – so perhaps in a way, this apparent decision to keep at the audience at arm's length can be seen as one of the film's strengths – a reflection of people the way they are (the leads were all non-actors, plucked from obscurity for their brief moment of film stardom before returning back to lives of anonymity). This sense of emotional detachment persists even when the film reaches its most sensuous moments, possibly because Wilder et al fail to decide whether they are telling us a story about people as a group or people as individuals and thus devote inadequate time and attention to both.