by Ed Sikov
One thing everyone agrees on is that Rochus Gliese quit in disgust soon after the production commenced because of Robert Siodmak’s relentless nagging. Siodmak proudly took full credit for Gliese’s departure: “Gliese shot so much film on the first day that I threw him out,” though the real chronology was more on the order of two weeks. Gliese’s exit, of course, enabled Siodmak to seize the reigns himself. As Wilder put it, “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.” The uppity Siodmak then said something obnoxious to Mrs. Edgar Ulmer, and before anyone knew what happened, the huffy Ulmers were on a boat heading for the States. Moritz Seeler, too, got so sick of the rampant ineptitude, ill feelings, and chronic shortage of funding that he left the film as well.
A happier portrait of Menschen am Sonntag’s production comes from a published contemporary account written by a freelance reporter for Tempo. In an article headlined “Wir vom filmstudio, 1929” (“We of the Film Studio, 1929”) Billie Wilder set forth the filmmakers’ ambitions and dreams. Trying to think up a title, Wilder noted, they considered Sommer 29 (Summer, ’29) and Junge Leute wie alle (Young People, Like Everybody) but finally settled on So ist es und nicht anders (It’s Just Like This and Not Otherwise) on the theory that this was exactly what they were trying to do with the film and that they should state their goals up front. They wanted to make their movie as realistically and simply as possible—no fake drama, just real life. There would be no Russian lieutenants or female spies—just average Berliners:
The five people in this movie—that’s you and me. God may punish us, but our waiter is a good guy who lives in Neukölln. God may punish us, but our heroine types on a typewriter and doesn’t own a pink divan on which she, deceiving spy that she is, elicits the fortification plans of Przemysl. Yes, strong action is missing—obvious conflicts and the devil knows what else. And we hope so. We have evaded all the worn-out turns and stayed on our entirely unused, terribly deserted path for many miles: the road sign says ‘Real Life’ … After the weekend is over, our boys are standing in front of a suburban cinema without seeing it. Behind them, a poster shouts, “Weekend magic.” This is the dissonance we want to show—between this weekend movie inside and the Sunday which our five real people have actually experienced.
Four weeks from the publication of the article, Wilder confidently reported, their film would be completed.
Billie was premature. Menschen am Sonntag ended up taking nine months to film and edit. In a later account of the production, this time for the newspaper Montag Morgen, Wilder recounted the process of selecting their “five real people.” In their honest effort to capture real life, they actually had the nerve to cast five real people: “At first, we thought about young actors,” Wilder reported, “but the people had to be genuine. We searched. Seeler found a taxi driver, Erwin Splettstösser—taxi number 1A10088—in front of a Kurfürstendamm bar. He was immediately cast. We found Freulein Borchert buying records. She was difficult to persuade; her family thought we were white slavers. In spite of that, she came to the test shoot on Thielplatz. Christl Ehlers also showed up; she had experience already, having once been an extra for Dupont. She also gave us her word of honor that she was on familiar terms with Lupu Pick’s cinematographer.” They met von Waltershausen by chance and found that he was perfect for the part of the traveling wine salesman.
Wilder acknowledged in the Montag Morgen account that the script (the treatment, really) was only seven pages long. He also admitted that the banker who financed the film did so in part because he believed in their success (according to Billie, 3 percent) and partly because he thought he would end up with an incredibly cheap movie (97 percent). The actors received ten marks per day. According to Wilder, they spent only a single day filming inside a studio; the rest was shot on the streets, in the parks, and at the lake.
Weather was an incessant problem, and everyone became more and more nervous—not least of all the financiers. Still, the squabbling consortium finished making its gutsy little movie, only to discover to their great chagrin that nobody wanted to see it. “We project it for the gentlemen of the big film companies. No one takes us seriously. The head of distribution swears that after thirty years’ experience, he will resign his job if this film even receives a premiere somewhere—not to speak at all of a success.” Finally, however, a Ufa executive named Hanns Brodnitz bought the distribution and exhibition rights to Menschen am Sonntag and booked its premiere at Ufa’s own theater on the Kurfürstendamm, a venue that specialized in quirky experimental films.
If the film’s premiere was any indication, Menschen am Sonntag was poised for blockbuster success, a development that was completely unexpected as far as the filmmakers were concerned. After the first screening, the audience applauded so enthusiastically and ceaselessly that an amazed Moritz Seeler pulled an even more amazed Robert Siodmak onto the stage for a bow. “I locked myself in the toilet and cried with relief,” Siodmak later said.
Deft, funny, and tender, Menschen am Sonntag opened on February 4, 1930. Its first-night success was not a fluke. The film was an instant hit, as Berliners saw themselves reproduced on-screen in gently satirical form. Ordinary alienated citizens meet for a few moments on the beach or in the park. Their encounters are wistful, more or less empty, and eminently recognizable to tens of thousands of alienated Berliners. The opening titles announce the film’s governing philosophy: “In this film, five young people play the roles that they live in real life. A taxi driver, a salesgirl, a girl from a record store, a traveling wine salesman, and a model. When the film was finished, the stars went back into the nameless crowd from which they came.”
Siodmak’s camera records, as best it can, a sense of unmediated humdrum—people hopping trolleys, doing their nails, smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk, riding in cars. A father washes his infant. Street cleaners sweep horseshit off the pavement. When characters speak (in the form of printed intertitles), they don’t sound at all glamorous: “Of course she has to see the Willy Fritsch film,” the cabdriver complains, referring to his girlfriend’s love of the popular German star. “Well, at least for my sake Garbo’s coming next week.”
As part of the wider Neue Sachlichkeit movement in German filmmaking (translating directly as the new matter-of-factness), Menschen am Sonntag meanders along without any apparent narrative drive. Incidental observations take the place of story structure. For instance, a man walks into a drab apartment, sits down at the table, and stubs his cigarette out on a plate. He pours himself a beer, drinks it, and reads the paper while, in the background, the faucet drips. Siodmak cuts back and forth between the man, the dripping faucet, and a woman lounging on a daybed; the man goes to an armoire and takes out a jacket; the woman goes to the same armoire and takes out her clothes, and in both cases the armoire door swings open after they leave and they have to return to shut it—the kind of purposeful accident that cross-section films depended upon to achieve a sense of inescapable quotidian misery. Nothing happens; that’s the point.
After its dreary urban opening scenes, a title card appears: “Alles zieht ins Grüne”—“everything moves into the green”—at which point traveling shots roll the collective vision forward and outward, rapidly transporting both characters and audience into the parks. Crowds of Berliners stream into the woods and onto the beaches, where a peculiar sort of love may bloom. In one scene, the camera follows the romantic pursuits of a young couple in a park. “Romantic” may be too mild a word; the encounter looks more like seasonal rutting. The male chases the female for a little while, after which they meet, embrace, and almost kiss. She runs away; he follows. She lies down against a rock. He touches her hair. She reaches for his face in what looks like a hostile gesture, then smooths it out and relaxes into an embrace. The camera tilts up to the treetops, and after a long pan around the upper reaches of the black-and-white greenery, it tilts back down again to reveal a pile of gar
bage. Only then does it pan back to the couple lying together on the ground. After another discreet tilt up again to the treetops, the camera returns to the couple just as the man is readjusting his tie. The woman, meanwhile, is lying on the ground looking nothing other than freshly screwed, at which point Siodmak cuts to a close-up of her batting eyes. She reaches under herself and pulls out a pinecone. They laugh, brush the dirt off their clothes, and head back to join their friends and resume their typical day.
Maurice Zolotow reports that the woman pulls an empty sardine can out from under her ass, but even Billie Wilder was never that crude—at least not at that point in his filmmaking career.
5. TAKING OFF
Don’t blame me—I’m not an executive, I’m just a writer.
—Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Sunset Boulevard
On the shocking strength of Menschen am Sonntag’s success, Robert Siodmak landed a scriptwriting job at Ufa, tapped personally by the head of the studio’s story department, Robert Liebmann. In addition to his managerial role, Liebmann was a most successful screenwriter himself. In fact, Liebmann was even more successful than Liebmann; everyone at the Romanisches knew that in addition to hiring screenwriters to write their own scripts, Liebmann hired ghostwriters to write under the eminently bankable name “Robert Liebmann.” This incensed Billie Wilder no end. There was work to be had, he wasn’t having it, and there was Liebmann stealing credit for work he never did. To top it off, Liebmann wouldn’t deign to hire young writers because he was afraid of the competition; so said Billie.
Synchronized sound had arrived in Germany, and movie characters suddenly had to have clever things to say as well as do. Never before had there been a more urgent demand for screenwriters. In 1929, the German film industry produced 210 silents and 14 sound films; one year later, III sound films stood in contrast to 75 silents (and of those 75, 15 were postsynched for sound). And the scale of Ufa’s productions seemed, to Billie at least, to be skyrocketing. Menschen am Sonntag had been cheap. It tried to be realistic, it worked, and the film made money. But Ufa’s leaders were eager to produce ever more extravagant productions, even if the interior world of the films was brutally realistic. According to Wilder, “Ufa started concentrating on films like The Blue Angel that cost ten times as much as the little silent pictures that we did. And so we had to go back to what the studios thought had a chance to make some profits. Our idea of doing pictures on a slightly higher level fell on its face.” Wilder may have been disgusted with Ufa’s way of doing business and making art, but he still wanted to write for the movies. (And no, Menschen am Sonntag is not on a slightly higher level than The Blue Angel.) Despite his involvement with a film that was still running on the Kurfürstendamm—and would continue to run for a total of six months—Billie couldn’t find any scriptwriting work. That is, until he pushed Liebmann’s button one day at the Romanisches Café.
Wilder, Siodmak, and others have all recounted the tale of how thoroughly and indelibly Billie impressed Robert Liebmann—not with his scriptwriting abilities, but with his exasperating chutzpah. It’s one of the few stories on which everyone agrees, so it actually appears to have more than the usual basis in fact. “One day Billie Wilder was inveighing loudly against Liebmann, whom he did not know. He declared that Liebmann didn’t give young talents any work. At this, a big, dark man in front of him turned around, fixed the impudent Billie in the eye, and said, ‘My name is Liebmann. Come into my office tomorrow.’” In one variation, Liebmann appears as a fat man who adds a fillip to Billie: “If you’re only one percent as talented in writing as you are in shooting off your mouth, I might give you some work.” Whether he was fat or not, Liebmann had but one working eye; the other was glass.
Wilder’s first assignment was to write a short film with Robert Siodmak—Der Kampf mit dem Drachen, oder: Die Tragödie des Untermieters (The Fight with the Dragon, or: The Tenants’ Tragedy), the surreal story of which runs more or less like this: a renter living in a furnished room goes berserk and his landlady drops dead. The inimitable Felix Bressart plays the crazed tenant, and Hedwig Wangel is the eponymous dragon-landlady. Bressart is held accountable for the death, but he’s found innocent by a jury of his peers, all of whom are equally tormented by fierce, fire-breathing landlords. Handing short subjects to promising but unproven talents was not uncommon at Ufa. The risk wasn’t nearly as great as it would be with a full-scale feature. After all, the worst the young filmmakers could do was to make an unwatchable twelve-minute movie. But even with a twelve-minute short subject there was more than enough room for dissent and subsequent backbiting. Curt Siodmak still insists that the idea for Der Kampf mit dem Drachen was his and his alone. Billie Wilder, he says, had nothing to do with it. (One notes a certain pattern here as far as Curt Siodmak is concerned.) In any event, Ufa’s executives were impressed enough with Der Kampf mit dem Drachen that they gave Robert Siodmak his own production unit, and he took Billie along. They were to report directly to the great Erich Pommer.
An anxious, chain-smoking firebrand, Pommer demanded the full attention of everyone who worked for him. Like any producer with an obsessive personality, Pommer worked intimately and tenaciously on several films at once. He always had an array of projects in the works, but what set him apart was his world-class good taste. He was driven—fiercely—to produce art through commerce. “Please invent something new,” Pommer had told the makers of Der letzte Mann, “even if it’s crazy!” “Pommer was not a man to have soft moments and make big friends,” Wilder recalled. “He was a very sober, very talented man—but there were no laughs there.” One can imagine the stale air in Pommer’s office, with Pommer and Wilder working hard to outdo each other with the smoking. According to Curt Siodmak, Billie couldn’t sit still in Pommer’s office, but then Billie couldn’t sit still anywhere. Pacing, snapping his fingers, sitting for a moment, pumping his leg, hopping up again and pacing—this had been characteristic of Wilder since childhood. For Billie, the fact that Pommer was head of production at Germany’s largest studio did not mean that he had to sit sedately in his chair and act cowed. Walter Reisch, to whom Billie introduced Pommer to the eventual success of both young writers, once said that of all the scripters under his command, Wilder was Pommer’s favorite: “Billie was the life of the party. Pommer adored him, always had him around, always listened to him.”
Apart from his intense, somber personality, Pommer had a nasty little habit: he liked to entice his fledgling writers with a stack of silver coins he kept on his desk. Whoever thought up a good idea got a coin tossed at him. Curt Siodmak reports, not surprisingly, that Billie was very good at Pommer’s game: Wilder was “a very quick thinker [with] the will to win. He was always the first one to shoot out an idea, never stopping his marching up and down. And there’s this world-famous man, Pommer, throwing him another coin. And Billie—he doesn’t even break step, he just keeps up his marching and catches the coins so we don’t stand a chance. And that pile of coins, it finished in Billie’s pants.”
Mostly, Billie spent his time working at home, rather than catching Erich Pommer’s spare change. Like almost all the other Ufa writers, Billie had no office at the studio. There was no Writers’ Building, as there was on all the big lots in Hollywood. Billie worked in his apartment, though he did go into the office frequently to meet with Pommer. When his scripts were finished, he dropped them off at one of Ufa’s Berlin offices, from which messengers spirited them out to the production facilities at Babelsberg and Tempelhof. Some of these scripts bore Wilder’s byline; some were ghosted. One of these ghosting assignments was the fluffy Ein Burschenlied aus Heidelberg (A Student Song from Heidelberg), starring Willi Forst. It was a romance—an American girl, a German boy—and the screenplay was eventually credited to the Viennese writer Ernst Neubach. No matter; Billie Wilder was writing movies for Ufa.
He was lucky to be employed in any capacity. In January of 1930, Germany’s unemployment rose in a single month from 1.5 million to 2.5 million. The effec
ts of the Wall Street crash were harsh and immediate, and Germany was especially vulnerable because of its history of trade and credit after World War I. An inordinate number of foreign loans were still outstanding. When the American stock market crashed, Germany’s many creditors called in their loans, and an enormous amount of capital went sailing out of Germany in exceedingly short order. The impact on the German people was swift. Tent communities sprang up in the woods outside Berlin—the very woods that were so idyllic in Menschen am Sonntag. Now they were squatters’ camps. In town, too, there was a looming shadow of despair and futility. Stephen Spender was living in Berlin at the time, watching the dark parade. He describes the city’s mood: “When we were sitting at the Romanisches Café, [a friend] said to me one evening, ‘There isn’t a girl sitting in this place who hasn’t scars on her veins in an attempt to commit suicide.’”