Hollywood and/or Bust

I have promised that our new series of films will showcase the comedies that Hollywood produced throughout the 1930s as their way of getting everyone through the Depression.

They always say you should begin at the beginning, but I think I can do better; I'm going to begin a little before that. 

With a German film. A German silent film.

Please don't panic.

Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) is actually a Hollywood film. No one knew that at the time, but it is.

It's a Hollywood film because it was written and directed by a very talented group of young film-makers at the very beginning of their careers. Hollywood Careers:

Robert Siodmak was forced to leave Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power. He fled initially to France and then to the United States where he established himself as one of the iconic figures in Hollywood with films such as The Killers (Burt Lancaster's unforgettable film debut) and The Spiral Staircase.

Curt Siodmak; Robert's brother, also fled Germany for the United States and became a preeminent screenwriter of classic horror titles, including The Wolf Man - a film for which he almost single-handedly invented the entire mythology around werewolves.

Edgar G Ulmer; another German-Jewish refugee who became one of the founding voices of the American "Film Noir" style with films such as Detour and Ruthless.

Fred Zinnemann; an Austrian born director who moved to Hollywood in 1930 and went on to direct such American classics as High Noon and From Here to Eternity.

Billy Wilder is probably one of the most famous and respected writer/directors of all time. Some Like it Hot; Double Indemnity; The Apartment; Sunset Boulevard... It's hard to imagine Hollywood without Billy Wilder. But Wilder had been born in a small town in Austria-Hungary, and he was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. His mother, grandmother and stepfather were all killed.

People On Sunday is a collaborative effort by all of these future Hollywood greats, and it's also a very intimate and natural document of a society that was about to vanish.

Introduced as a "film without actors", People On Sunday is simply a portrait of a group of ordinary Berliners as they enjoy their day off. All of the main characters are played by real people, and much of the film serves as a document of life in Berlin during the summer of 1929.

Berlin at that time was a thriving, modern, inclusive metropolis during an era when the prevailing attitudes were decidedly liberal and permissive. But of course, all of that was about to change.

The American stock market crash hit the German economy very hard, and the Nazi party was able to exploit the social chaos that followed. Just a few years after the release of People On Sunday, this entire way of life in Germany was gone forever.

But all of that was still in the future for the People on Sunday. On this day, in this city, life was as they assumed it always would be. No one had any notion that their society was so close to the precipice. 

People on Sunday is a very gentle film, and a valuable slice of modern history. But it's also a reminder. Nothing carries on forever. Those warm summer Sundays come to an end. And tomorrow is going to be very different.

We're screening People On Sunday at 7.30pm on Thursday, the 25th of January at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.