# People on Sunday
**People on Sunday** (German: *Menschen am Sonntag*) is a 1930 German silent film directed by [Robert Siodmak](https://www.edgepedia.org/robert-siodmak) and Edgar G. Ulmer, with a screenplay by [Billy Wilder](https://www.edgepedia.org/billy-wilder) based on a reportage by Curt Siodmak, about five young Berliners who spend their one day off together at the lakes outside the city.[1](https://www.filmportal.de/en/movie/menschen-am-sonntag_ea43d4a75bf75006e03053d50b37753d) It was made independently, on a small budget, by a collective of amateurs who went on to major Hollywood careers, and it is widely regarded as a precursor of [Italian neorealism](https://www.edgepedia.org/italian-neorealism) and the French New Wave.[2](https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2008/julyaugust/feature/sunday-filmmakers)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Original title | *Menschen am Sonntag*, subtitled "a film without actors"[1](https://www.filmportal.de/en/movie/menschen-am-sonntag_ea43d4a75bf75006e03053d50b37753d) |
| Premiere | 4 February 1930, U.T. Kurfürstendamm, Berlin; French premiere 9 May 1930, Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, Paris[1](https://www.filmportal.de/en/movie/menschen-am-sonntag_ea43d4a75bf75006e03053d50b37753d) |
| Principal credits | Direction: Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer; screenplay: Billy Wilder, from a reportage by Curt Siodmak; cinematography: Eugen Schüfftan, assisted by Fred Zinnemann; produced by Moriz Seeler[3](https://www.criterion.com/films/27625) |
| Cast | Five nonprofessionals playing themselves: Erwin Splettstößer (taxi driver), Brigitte Borchert (record seller), Wolfgang von Waltershausen (wine seller), Christl Ehlers (film extra), Annie Schreyer (model)[3](https://www.criterion.com/films/27625) |
| Shooting | 10 July to 11 December 1929, in Berlin and its surroundings, chiefly the Wannsee[1](https://www.filmportal.de/en/movie/menschen-am-sonntag_ea43d4a75bf75006e03053d50b37753d) |
| Running time | 74 minutes, black and white, 35 mm, 1.33:1[4](https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/9387953e-c096-505d-ad22-66e5466c25e6/people-on-sunday) |
| Historical standing | Regarded as a landmark of Weimar cinema that influenced Italian Neorealism and the New Wave cinemas of the 1960s[5](https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/people-on-sunday-menschen-am-sonntag-9781839027550/) |
## Spoilers
### Story and style
The premise is deliberately slight. On Saturday evening the taxi driver Erwin quarrels with his wife Annie over how she wears her hat and stays home; his friend Wolfgang, a traveling wine salesman, has met the film extra Christl at a tram stop and arranged a Sunday outing, and Christl brings her friend Brigitte, who sells records. The four travel to a lake, swim, picnic, listen to a portable gramophone, ride a pedal boat, and trade flirtations, while Annie oversleeps and misses the day.[6](https://www.goethe.de/en/kul/flm/arc/fdb.cfm?filmdbId=1808121034550100001) The film ends with the group returning to the city and to work, and an intertitle noting that four million Berliners were waiting for the next Sunday.[9](https://markbould.com/2015/07/30/menschen-am-sonntagpeople-on-sunday-siodmak-and-ulmer-1930/)
The film announces itself as "a film without actors." Each of the five leads plays a character with the same name and real day job as the performer, drawn from the minor professions of Berlin's young urban workforce, and the opening intertitles state that they appear before a camera for the first time and are today back at their old jobs.[7](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1904-people-on-sunday-young-people-like-us) Shooting was almost entirely on location, with the city's boulevards, cafés, lakes, and beaches substituting for studio sets; the single interior set was Erwin and Annie's apartment.[7](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1904-people-on-sunday-young-people-like-us) • [9](https://markbould.com/2015/07/30/menschen-am-sonntagpeople-on-sunday-siodmak-and-ulmer-1930/) The crew filmed on city streets, showing storefronts, passersby, and traffic without permits or releases.[10](https://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s3594sund.html)
**Between documentary and fiction.** The film takes the city symphony form (silent-film genre of montage portraits of city life), associated in Germany with Walter Ruttmann's *[Berlin: Symphony of a Great City](https://www.edgepedia.org/berlin-symphony-of-a-great-city)* (1927) and internationally with Alberto Cavalcanti's *Rien que les heures* (1926) and [Dziga Vertov](https://www.edgepedia.org/dziga-vertov)'s *Man with a Movie Camera* (1929), in a new direction: instead of a coldly abstract cross-section of the metropolis, it blends avant-garde documentary with a light narrative, cutting away from the characters to real Berliners at work and at leisure.[7](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1904-people-on-sunday-young-people-like-us) • [9](https://markbould.com/2015/07/30/menschen-am-sonntagpeople-on-sunday-siodmak-and-ulmer-1930/) It is considered a key representative of the Neue Sachlichkeit ([New Objectivity](https://www.edgepedia.org/new-objectivity)) movement in film.[11](https://www.stummfilm-live.de/en/project/people-on-sunday/)
## Production
The film grew out of Berlin's coffeehouse scene. The group that made it, including Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Eugen Schüfftan, Edgar G. Ulmer, and the producer Moriz Seeler, met at the Romanisches Café to launch the project, and the idea was developed in conversations there and in the city's bars.[6](https://www.goethe.de/en/kul/flm/arc/fdb.cfm?filmdbId=1808121034550100001) The production company was Filmstudio 1929, a one-off collective put together by the crew members and the theater impresario Moriz Seeler, nominally underwritten by Nero-Film boss Heinrich Nebenzahl, maternal uncle of the Siodmak brothers.[7](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1904-people-on-sunday-young-people-like-us)
**A collective of beginners.** After the seasoned director Rochus Gliese abandoned the project early on, codirection fell to Robert Siodmak, twenty-eight, and Edgar G. Ulmer, twenty-four, neither of whom had made a feature film. Billy Wilder, twenty-three, wrote the script with input from Curt Siodmak, twenty-six; the camera was operated by the veteran special-effects technician Eugen Schüfftan, thirty-six, the oldest of the group, with [Fred Zinnemann](https://www.edgepedia.org/fred-zinnemann), twenty-two, as his assistant.[7](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1904-people-on-sunday-young-people-like-us) Only Schüfftan, at the camera, was a professional.[8](https://www.weimarcinema.org/file/Chronicle/1930.pdf)
Accounts of the financing differ. Curt Siodmak maintained that the first 5,000 marks of a 9,000-mark total (roughly 2,500 US dollars at the time) came from his own pocket; Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder said the money was borrowed from their uncle Heinrich Nebenzahl; Ulmer insisted he had set the film up with 5,000 dollars he had brought from America.[2](https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2008/julyaugust/feature/sunday-filmmakers) A contemporary review cited by the film scholar Noah Isenberg lists the total production cost at 28,000 reichsmarks, just under 7,000 dollars.[7](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1904-people-on-sunday-young-people-like-us)
## Reception and the careers it launched
The premiere at the UFA-Theater am [Kurfürstendamm](https://www.edgepedia.org/kurfurstendamm) on 4 February 1930 was a critical success, embraced by nearly all of Berlin's leading newspapers, which called it "a grand success," "magnificent," and "a delightful film."[7](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1904-people-on-sunday-young-people-like-us) The surprise success started Robert Siodmak's directing career and established Schüfftan as a cinematographer; Wilder and Zinnemann later made world careers after emigrating.[12](https://www.deutsche-kinemathek.de/de/kinemathek/publikationen/menschen-am-sonntag) Siodmak received a UFA contract the day after the premiere, and Wilder wrote five screenplays for UFA films by 1932.[13](https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/794fb3f6-f442-43fd-aed9-de68838771a9/content) In Hollywood, Siodmak and Ulmer became noted directors of film noir, Zinnemann directed films including *High Noon* (1952), Wilder became one of Hollywood's leading writer-directors, and Schüfftan won a cinematography Oscar for *The Hustler* (1961).[2](https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2008/julyaugust/feature/sunday-filmmakers) • [9](https://markbould.com/2015/07/30/menschen-am-sonntagpeople-on-sunday-siodmak-and-ulmer-1930/)
## Legacy
Film historians have read *People on Sunday* as anticipating Italian neorealism, the [French New Wave](https://www.edgepedia.org/french-new-wave), Morris Engel's *Little Fugitive* (1953), and later independent movements from New German Cinema to [Dogme 95](https://www.edgepedia.org/dogme-95).[2](https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2008/julyaugust/feature/sunday-filmmakers) • [7](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1904-people-on-sunday-young-people-like-us) Its improvisatory, shot-on-location production and blending of reality and fiction predate [Jean Renoir](https://www.edgepedia.org/jean-renoir)'s loosely scripted pastoral films *Toni* and *Partie de campagne*.[2](https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2008/julyaugust/feature/sunday-filmmakers) The film is also valued as a document of Weimar Berlin: it captures the city's street life and leisure culture at the end of the 1920s, shortly before the Great Depression and the rise of National Socialism transformed German life.[14](https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/10-great-films-about-weekend)
**Restoration.** The film was heavily edited after release and nearly lost. It was reconstructed from prints held in several archives in Amsterdam in 1998 by the Nederlands Filmmuseum, working with the Cinémathèque Suisse, the Fondazione Cineteca Italiana, the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, and Taurus-Film; the restored version runs 74 minutes.[15](https://www.uni-bremen.de/fileadmin/user_upload/fachbereiche/fb9/film/Filmymposium/2025_-_Netzwerk_Agnes_Varda__Essayismen__Feminismen__Modernismen/Symp_2025_Programme_EN.pdf) • [16](https://www.filmportal.de/en/node/51987/stock) It was digitized in 2K in 2010 and remastered in 2014 under the supervision of the Deutsche Kinemathek in collaboration with the EYE Filminstituut Nederland.[12](https://www.deutsche-kinemathek.de/de/kinemathek/publikationen/menschen-am-sonntag) The Criterion Collection issued the restoration on Blu-ray and DVD with two new scores, by the Mont Alto Orchestra and by Elena Kats-Chernin.[3](https://www.criterion.com/films/27625)
## References
1. [Menschen am Sonntag, filmportal.de](https://www.filmportal.de/en/movie/menschen-am-sonntag_ea43d4a75bf75006e03053d50b37753d)
2. [Sunday Filmmakers, National Endowment for the Humanities](https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2008/julyaugust/feature/sunday-filmmakers)
3. [People on Sunday (1930), The Criterion Collection](https://www.criterion.com/films/27625)
4. [People on Sunday (1930), BFI](https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/9387953e-c096-505d-ad22-66e5466c25e6/people-on-sunday)
5. [People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag), BFI Film Classics, Bloomsbury](https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/people-on-sunday-menschen-am-sonntag-9781839027550/)
6. [Menschen am Sonntag, Film catalogue, Goethe-Institut](https://www.goethe.de/en/kul/flm/arc/fdb.cfm?filmdbId=1808121034550100001)
7. [Noah Isenberg, People on Sunday: Young People Like Us, The Criterion Collection](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1904-people-on-sunday-young-people-like-us)
8. [Films of the Year 1930, WeimarCinema.org](https://www.weimarcinema.org/file/Chronicle/1930.pdf)
9. [Mark Bould, Menschen am Sonntag/People on Sunday (Siodmak and Ulmer 1930)](https://markbould.com/2015/07/30/menschen-am-sonntagpeople-on-sunday-siodmak-and-ulmer-1930/)
10. [DVD Savant Blu-ray Review: People on Sunday, DVD Talk](https://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s3594sund.html)
11. [People on Sunday, Stummfilm-Live](https://www.stummfilm-live.de/en/project/people-on-sunday/)
12. [Menschen am Sonntag, Deutsche Kinemathek](https://www.deutsche-kinemathek.de/de/kinemathek/publikationen/menschen-am-sonntag)
13. [Filmische Codes zur Gestaltung medialer Selbstreferenzen in Menschen am Sonntag (1930), Humboldt-Universität edoc](https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/794fb3f6-f442-43fd-aed9-de68838771a9/content)
14. [10 great films about the weekend, BFI](https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/10-great-films-about-weekend)
15. [Menschen am Sonntag, symposium programme, Universität Bremen](https://www.uni-bremen.de/fileadmin/user_upload/fachbereiche/fb9/film/Filmymposium/2025_-_Netzwerk_Agnes_Varda__Essayismen__Feminismen__Modernismen/Symp_2025_Programme_EN.pdf)
16. [Archive Holdings: Menschen am Sonntag, filmportal.de](https://www.filmportal.de/en/node/51987/stock)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Early and silent cinema › European national silent cinemas*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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