- Person
- Billy Wilder
- Lived
- 1906–2002
- Field
- Film
- From
- Austrian-American
The story
Billy Wilder was born in 1906 into a Jewish family in Sucha, in Galicia, and grew up in Kraków and Vienna. Instead of going to university he became a journalist, and in 1926 he followed the bandleader Paul Whiteman, whom he had interviewed, to Berlin. There he wrote crime and sports stories for newspapers and began writing for the movies.
People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag) was made by a collective of young Berliners working on a shoestring. Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer directed from a screenplay by Wilder, based on reportage by Robert's brother Curt Siodmak, with Eugen Schüfftan as cinematographer and Fred Zinnemann as his assistant. The money came largely from the Siodmaks' relative Heinrich Nebenzal, and his son Seymour co-produced.
Filmed on Sundays in the summer of 1929 and subtitled a film without actors, it starred amateurs playing roughly their own jobs: a taxi driver, a wine salesman, a film extra and a record shop assistant. The story is simple. Four young people take the train out to the lakes at Wannsee, swim, picnic, flirt and quarrel, then go back to work on Monday. Released in February 1930, it became a surprise hit.
Breaking with the brooding Expressionism of directors such as F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, its loose, observational style made it a landmark of the New Objectivity movement in German cinema, and this kind of street film helped pave the way for Italian neorealism and the French New Wave. Wilder went on to write the screenplay for the 1931 adaptation of Erich Kästner's Emil and the Detectives, along with several other German films.
When the Nazis came to power, many of the film's makers, Wilder, Siodmak, Ulmer and Zinnemann among them, eventually found their way to Hollywood, where they became major directors. Seen today, People on Sunday is also a poignant record of everyday Berlin life in the last years before Hitler, and in 2002 it was given a new score for a screening at Berlin's Jewish Culture Days.
Why it matters
People on Sunday showed how much truth could be captured with a camera and everyday people, and launched several of Hollywood's great careers.
About Billy Wilder
Refugee from Nazi Berlin who became Hollywood’s sharpest writer-director, making Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, and winning six competitive Oscars.
More about Billy Wilder
- Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity helped define film noirBilly Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), co-written with Raymond Chandler, became one of the defining films of film noir.
- Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend took addiction seriouslyBilly Wilder's 1945 film The Lost Weekend, a stark portrait of an alcoholic writer, won the Oscar for Best Picture and the top prize at the first Cannes festival.
- Billy Wilder stood up for blacklisted colleaguesIn 1947 Billy Wilder joined the Committee for the First Amendment, which defended Hollywood figures targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
- Billy Wilder helped show Germans the truth of the campsIn 1945 Billy Wilder returned to Germany with the US Army's psychological warfare unit and supervised the English version of Death Mills, a film documenting the Nazi camps.
Sources
- Billy Wilder Wikipedia
- People on Sunday Wikipedia
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