This magical blend of documentary and fiction takes us back to a glorious summer Sunday in late-1920s Berlin where five young workers take a day off. While they enjoy freedoms undreamt of by their parents, sexual rivalry soon lends an edge to their flirtations. The backdrop to the film is the Weimar Republic, founded in 1919, and the urban cosmopolitanism of Berlin at the time, which would come to end in just a few years with the rise of the Nazis and the end of democracy.
The people portraying the characters were all amateurs belonging to a Berlin collective who, the opening credits inform us, had returned to their normal jobs by the time of the film’s release. They included a taxi driver, a record seller and a wine merchant. This revolutionary experiment in realism was the collective effort of several future Hollywood directors, including Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann.
The film "Menschen am Sonntag" portrays in a half-documentary style the life of young people in the metropolis of Berlin at the end of the 1920s. Four of the five leading actors stood in front of the camera for the first time. The young Christl Ehlers had played a major role in the fairy tale film Ms. Holle a year earlier. The film is worth seeing because of the authentic pictures from that time, from the station Zoo, the station Nikolassee, the Havel at the "large window" and Wannsee.The later Oscar winner Billy Wilder wrote the screenplay with Robert Siodmak after an idea of Robert's brother Curt Siodmak: The Siodmak brothers also made a career in both German and American films, with Edgar G. Ulmer mainly shooting Hollywood films, whose history makes the film one of the first independent films and a forerunner of post-war neo-realism.
Menschen am Sonntag is a film by Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer and Billy Wilder. It was produced by Moriz Seeler's production company "Filmstudio 1929" and was made in and around Berlin in 1929 and 1930. The premiere was on February 4, 1930. He is one of the late representatives of New Objectivity in film.
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