Menschen am Sonntag (1930)

Menschen am Sonntag (1930)


Menschen am Sonntag aka People on Sunday is a 1929 German silent movie, directed by Curt and Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer and Fred Zinnemann from a screenplay by Billy Wilder. It follows the lives of a group of residents of Berlin on a summer's day during the interwar period. It is a pivotal film not only in the development of German cinema but also of Hollywood[1]. In addition to the Siodmak brothers and Wilder, the film features the talents of Edgar G. Ulmer (producer), Fred Zinnemann (cinematography) and Eugen Schüfftan, who had developed the Schüfftan process for Metropolis two years previously.

The movie is subtitled "a film without actors" and was filmed over a succession of Sundays in the summer of 1929. The actors were amateurs whose day jobs were those that they portrayed in the film—the opening titles inform the audience that these actors have all returned to their normal jobs by the time of the film's release in February, 1930. They were part of a collective of young Berliners who wrote and produced the film themselves, on a shoestring budget.

Menschen am Sonntag is notable not only for its portrayal of daily life in Berlin shortly before Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, but also as an early work by the future Hollywood writer/director Billy Wilder before he moved to the United States to escape from Hitler's Germany. Wilder's mother, grandmother, and stepfather all died at the Auschwitz extermination camp.


IMDB: 8.0/10

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020163/
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