People on Sunday

People on Sunday, a silent B&W German docudrama from 1930, was restored by the Netherlands, splicing pieces from reels surviving in its and other countries' archives. Criterion's DVD package, using its secondary Janus label, marketed the film both as a precursor of neo-realism and a historic showcase of the talents of a film-making cooperative of Berlin-based youngsters. Most were Jewish, and soon left Nazi Germany.

Its losses were Hollywood's multiple gain:

* the movie's concept creator Kurt (aka Curt) Siodmak, a former newspaper reporter, became a Hollywood horror-writing specialist, as for the original (1941) Wolf Man.

* his younger brother and the movie's main co-director Robert (The Killers) Siodmak, a prolific maker of film noir movies in the USA, who returned to Germany in the 1950s, winning a Golden Bear for The Rats.

* The Siodmaks' cousin, Seymour Nebenzal, the film's key producer (borrowing funds from his movie-producer father Heinrich). He later made Fritz Lang's M and Testament of Dr Mabuse, then movies in Paris, before fleeing to the USA, where his independent production company's many titles included Douglas Sirk's Hitler's Madman and Summer Storm, and Joseph Losey's re-make of M.

* Czech-born co-producer Edgar G Ulmer, who'd returned from the States (and returned there too, to become the director of Black Cat, Detour and Ukrainian-language and Yiddish niche movies in the USA).

[He was blackballed from Hollywood work after he had an affair with Shirley Castle (he eventually married her and she became known as Shirley Ulmer), who at the time was the wife of B-picture producer Max Alexander, a nephew of powerful Universal Pictures president Carl Laemmle. Ulmer spent the bulk of his remaining career languishing at PRC, the lowest rung on the ladder of Hollywood's poverty row studios.] [IMDb]

* co-writer Billy Wilder, multiple Oscar-winner for The Apartment (film, direction, co-writing), Sunset Blvd (co-writing), and The Lost Weekend (director, co-writer), with 14 other nominations. The former journalist's main chore for the film was holding the sun-reflector.

* cinematographer Eugen Schufftan, later aka Eugene Shufftan), who invented a self-named camera special effect and won an Oscar for The Hustler. The DVD package includes the charming Schufftan-directed 1929 B&W short comedy Ins Blaue Hinein (Into the Blue), with soundtrack added, telling another happy-go-lucky tale (of three men and a girl crashing a car and starting a dog-grooming business).

* assistant cameraman Fred Zinneman, Oscar-winning director of A Man for All Seasons, From Here to Eternity, and a documentary short (Benjy).

* assistant cameraman Ernst Kunstmann was invited to the USA with Schufftan, returning to work in Germany until the 1960s (including Triumph of the Will in 1935), dying at 97 in his home city of Potsdam.

The film's non-professional actors' fates were less illustrious. The four lead roles were played by:

* Erwin (Splettstoller), who only had two other acting credits, in Robert Siodmak movies in 1930-1. The wannabee comic actor died in a car accident (according to co-star Brigitte).

In the film, chubby, affable Erwin is a taxi-driver leaving his fashion model girl-friend oversleeping in bed, to go to the Wannsee lake beach on a pre-planned trip with his friend ...

* ... Wolf(gang von Waltershausen), who made one more film for Siodmak, and another with Siodmak and Wilder, returned to his family estate in southern Germany, per Brigitte.

En route to the beach, the two friends meet up with a girl Wolf had chatted up in the city on a weekday ...

* Christl (Ehlers), whose real-life Jewish family fled to Spain, then England and America, where she had one bit part before marrying an aircraft company owner; they died in a plane crash in 1960.

Joining her for the lake excursion is her blonde best friend, a salesgirl for the Electrola record-player and disc company ...

* Brigitte (Borchert) who only made this one film; in 2000 she and Curt Siodmak were interviewed for a 30-minute documentary commemorating the restoration, Weekend am Wannsee (part of the Criterion DVD); Siodmak, then 98, couldn't recall her name and didn't like the restoration. He looked and sounded mentally active but died that year. Brigitte died in 2011, aged 100.

At first sighting, the movie's most promising talent is clearly the cinematographer. Exciting angles, shadowed lighting, story-advancing close-ups, exceptional grid-work framing and high-speed photography from moving vehicles provide bewitching images of a happy-go-lucky laid-back Berlin on a Sunday, contrasted uncritically with the city's weekday bustle. In cinematographic albums with few signs of poverty and none of oppression, the Siodmaks' self-described "reportage" presents a self-content middle-class view of the pre-Depression capital city, in which the cameras nod somewhat jocularly in the direction of Soviet Russian expressionism and Eisenstein moments.

Nothing much happens, but it does so charmingly. Wolf, an experienced philanderer, fails to hit on Christl during the foursome's picnic, but succeeds in seducing Brigitte. The girls resume their friendship on a giant pedalo boat, wryly watching the men flirt with a couple of oarless female rowers. Wolf agrees to meeting Brigitte again the next Sunday, before Erwin reminds him they'd already planned to go to a soccer match.

The DVD company's judgment is valid: not a Criterion-calibre classic, the film's a preservation-worthy Janus product.