People on Sunday (Film Studio 1929, Filmstudio Berlin, 1929, released 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night from 11 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. my husband Charles and I watched a DVD of a film I’ve literally been curious about for decades: Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), an independent silent film from 1929 (though it wasn’t released until 1930) featuring a lot of people who ended up in the U.S. and had either important or at least semi-important careers here. The officially listed directors are Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, with Siodmak’s brother Curt, Fred Zinnemann, and Rochus Gliese listed on imdb.com as uncredited co-directors. The writing credits list Billy Wilder for the screenplay based on “reportage” by Curt Siodmak, and imdb.com lists Robert Siodmak and Ulmer as uncredited co-writers. The cinematographer is Eugen Schüfftan, the special-effects wizard behind such legendary films as Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen and Metropolis, and Zinnemann and Ernst Kunstmann are listed on imdb.com as uncredited members of the camera crew. People on Sunday is an example of a sort of al fresco filmmaking that was actually fairly common in the silent era, though when sound came in it pretty much disappeared. It only became technically possible again in the 1960’s, when cameras became smaller and Nagra and others developed more compact and sophisticated tape recorders with which you could do synchronized sound on location. Billy Wilder had fond memories of this movie when Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg interviewed him for their 1969 book The Celluloid Muse: “In 1927 I ran into a group of young guys who were interested in making movies. I wrote a script and – my God! – somehow we turned it into a film, People on Sunday. We borrowed money from the uncle of Robert Siodmak, the director. And Robert was the director for a very simple reason: when kids play football on a meadow the one who owns the football is the captain, and he owned the camera.” (One wonders how Ulmer got a co-director credit; did he own a second camera?) While some of the people, including Ulmer and Schüfftan, had had professional film credits before, most of the people involved in the film were newbies, some of whom scored major contracts with UFA, the largest studio in Germany, after it became a surprise hit.

The makers of People on Sunday worked with nonprofessional actors who actually worked the sorts of jobs the script tells us the characters worked: taxi driver Erwin Splettstößer, record seller Brigitte Borchert, wine seller Wolfgang von Waltershausen, movie extra Christi Ehlers, and fashion model Annie Schreyer. The film opens on a Saturday, when Erwin and Annie, who live together, have an argument which results in their tearing down the photos of movie stars they’ve put up on their wall, him putting up women like Greta Garbo and she putting up men like Willy Fritsch (best known as the male leads in Fritz Lang’s Spies and Woman in the Moon). Erwin was planning an outing to a local beach on Sunday, but Annie begs off. Erwin ends up picking up a woman named Christi, who tags along on the Sunday picnic with Wolfgang and his girlfriend Brigitte. The four of them have a pretty ordinary day during which they take a ride on the lake in a preposterously driven rental boat they have to pedal (naturally the men do the pedaling while the women sit in front). They have their pictures taken by a professional photographer who, according to the German titles (this print had English subtitles under the original German intertitles), tells his subjects, “Bitte recht freundlich!” The official translation we’re given is “Smile, please!” but the literal meaning is “Please be friendly.” (Google Translate rendered it as “Please be kind.”)

There are cuts back and forth between the photographer working with the subjects and freeze-frames of the resulting pictures. There’s also a scene in which Erwin and Christi are listening to a record on a portable phonograph of the kind Christi sells at her workplace, and one of the records breaks as they make love. (Charles joked about all the movies in which a relative of one-half of a couple has to die, or at least get injured or sick, so they can have sex. At least, this time, it’s only a record.) Things start to unravel between the four when the two men spot two young women in a rowboat. They’ve dropped one of their oars into the water, and one of Our Heroes rescues it from the water and hands it back to them. Then he writes something, presumably his phone number, on a piece of paper, which he crumples up and throws at the rowboat. Naturally Brigitte and Christi are not happy about how blatantly their dates are flirting with other women. They get a sort of revenge when the men come up a mark short of the boat rental and have to borrow it from one of the women. In the end, Erwin returns to Annie – who’s spent the day sleeping in. Monday rolls around and there’s a dramatic montage scene of not only the principals but everyone in Berlin returning to work after their Sunday afternoon off.

People on Sunday is a lovely pastoral that’s considered a representative of the “New Objectivity” in German art that was challenging Expressionism. It’s also a heartbreaking look at Berlin in the later days of the Weimar Republic just before the Nazi takeover in January 1933; one can’t help but look at the children in the film and wonder how many of them survived World War II and the Holocaust, and in what shape. It’s a haunting movie in its sheer ordinariness, and yet it’s nowhere near as innovative as the German critics of the time thought it was. Much of it reminded me of the 1928 U.S. film Lonesome, which was cast with professional actors and was more tightly scripted than this one, but also featured a plot line of ordinary people enjoying themselves on a beach resort for the weekend. Lonesome had some sequences in two-strip Technicolor, including at least one that contained synchronized dialogue – and I suspect that was the first time a film sequence had both sound and color. People on Sunday was an estimable way for some major talents (Wilder, Zinnemann, Ulmer, Schüfftan, and both Siodmak brothers) to start their film careers, and through much of it I wondered why Christi Ehlers in particular didn’t have more of a movie career. Not only does she have the most arresting face of anybody in this film, as an extra she was already used to working in movies, and she can act. It turns out that that’s just one more missed opportunity you can blame on the Nazis: Ehlers’s father was Jewish and the moment the Nazis took power, they skedaddled out of Germany, first to the British-held island of Mallorca off the coast of Spain, then to Britain itself and briefly to the U.S., where she played a minor role in an anti-Nazi movie called Escape (1940). The two men in People on Sunday went on to at least minor careers in German films, many of them with Siodmak as director; among Waltershausen’s other credits is Der Mann, der seinen Mörder schucht (“The Man Who Hides His Murderer”) (1931), the Siodmak-directed original for the 1949 and 2022 versions of D.O.A., in which a man who’s been given a slow-acting poison has to find who gave it to him and why in the few days he has left.