Review of People on Sunday

Directed by Robert and Curt Siodmak from a screenplay by Billy Wilder, and with the participation of Edgar G. Ulmer, MENSCHEN AM SONNTAG is a drama filmed over four Sundays in 1929, involving a series of young men and women who flirt with one another, spend time at the beach, enjoy the pleasures of the recreational areas in and around Berlin, and resolve to meet the next Sunday. The plot is gossamer-thin, involving a series of sensual encounters between the semiprofessional actors; the camera focuses on their lips, their bodies and their clothing. Even in the most mundane situations there can be some kind of sexual exchange. More interestingly, the film offers fascinating glimpses of Berlin in the pre-Hitler era; the gorgeous eighteenth and nineteenth century architecture; the laid-back lifestyle of a people living their leisure time to the full; the camera pans of the stores, including a surfeit of Jewish businesses; and the teeming beaches and streets full of people blissfully unaware of what was to follow in the next decade. The film is almost prelapsarian in tone, portraying a world upon which - to use a term familiar in another socio-historical context - the sun appeared never to set.