DANC ING ON THE E DG E
• JOSEPH Mc B R I D E
3 “FILM, THAT’S NO PROFESSION FOR ADULTS”
Back then [in Europe], there was hardly a screenwriter or director who did not say: “I would really like to go to Hollywood!” . . . [And yet] One always asked oneself, “Am I good enough to write in Hollywood? Am I good enough to direct in Hollywood?” —Billy Wilder, 1980
WHEN I interviewed Wilder with Todd McCarthy in 1978, one of the
topics we discussed was his final return as a filmmaker to Germany to make Fedora, an even more morbid commentary on the Hollywood star system than Sunset Blvd. Shooting a tax-shelter production based in Munich after Hollywood rejected the project was a strange sort of homecoming for a major American filmmaker who had served his apprenticeship in Berlin. Wilder’s willingness to go back to Germany intermittently to make films after World War II was in contrast to Ernst Lubitsch’s utter rejection of his former homeland after Hitler’s takeover in 1933. On his final visit to Berlin in December 1932, Lubitsch told a Jewish journalist, Bella Fromm, who asked if he might work there again, “That’s finished. I’m going to the United States. Nothing good is going to happen here for a long time. The sun shines every day in Hollywood.” Lubitsch died not long after the war ended, but given his attitude toward Germany—after the Nazi takeover, he refused to let the language be spoken in his home, according to his daughter, Nicola—it is
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doubtful he would have succumbed to any such overtures. But even though Wilder lost close relatives in the Holocaust, he was always more pragmatic, returning to Germany after the war to work for the U.S. Army on the deNazification effort and for Hollywood studios doing location shooting on A Foreign Affair and One, Two, Three. Fedora brought his career full circle from one kind of exile to another, almost fifty years later. Even though that film was shot in English, it was a bittersweet sort of return to his roots in the German cinema. Wilder told us, “I have some kind of a reputation in Germany, why I don’t know, because when I left Germany I was just one of the writers at UFA. Since the other ones are dead, suddenly the mantle of [F. W.] Murnau, and of Fritz Lang, and of Erich Pommer, and of Lubitsch falls on my shoulders. I was just a writer of maybe one or two pictures that were of some interest. But now I come to Germany and they gave me a party and, my God, old UFA is going to rise again.” The “one or two pictures that were of some interest” would include, by anyone’s measure, People on Sunday and Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives, 1931). Some of the others have their merits as well, especially the 1932 releases A Blonde Dream and Scampolo, ein Kind der Strasse (Scampolo, A Child of the Streets).* But though Wilder was always justifiably proud of People on Sunday, he disparaged most of his journeyman work as a screenwriter in Germany, saying that the films he had to work on were “too sentimental.” In a darker mood, he complained to biographer Kevin Lally, “Do I have to talk about them? They were all lousy.” But when “pressed” by Lally about Emil and the Detectives, Wilder admitted, “That was pretty good.” Wilder was overly dismissive of his other German work, despite its wildly uneven nature and tendency to fall prey to the kind of schmaltz he later disdained in Hollywood. It was no coincidence that he spoke fondly of Emil and People on Sunday, although superficially they are quite different kinds of films, since People on Sunday is a shoestring semidocumentary drama with an amateur cast, and Emil is a polished work of professional narrative filmmaking. It is a charmingly comical adaptation, with some dark elements, of a popular children’s novel about adolescents banding together in the metropolis to catch
* Scampolo is also known as Ein Mädel der Strasse (A Girl of the Streets) and Um einen Groschen liebe (Love for a Penny).
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an adult criminal. But despite their genre differences, both films stand out in the list of Wilder’s German credits because of the sustained use and raw authenticity of their street settings and their often grim implications about daily life in Berlin. They also contrast sharply with the deliberately airy escapism of most of Wilder’s assignments at UFA, the country’s leading studio, in his brief period as a German screenwriter (1928–1933). As he indicated, those other films tend to suffer from the kind of formulaic, escapist, sentimental plots he would avoid in the films he eventually directed in Hollywood. A number of Wilder’s German scripts were for operettenfilmen, or cinematic operettas. A popular genre that flourished with the coming of sound, it was one he did not find particularly congenial to his talents or interests (he mocks the genre to some extent in The Emperor Waltz). Nevertheless, he worked in that format surprisingly often in both Germany and the United States, if not always by his own wish, but sometimes even in the films he directed. Unlike the operettas Lubitsch was filming in Hollywood, which draw from the Viennese tradition and have luxurious settings and often royal or upper-class characters, many of the operettas being made in Germany while Wilder was toiling there had contemporary settings, with characters from the working class. Even so, while Lubitsch in The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, and The Smiling Lieutenant cleverly and paradoxically provides biting social satire thinly disguised under frivolous surfaces, the agenda of the German operettenfilm genre in Wilder’s time at UFA was not social criticism or subversion of the established order (at least overtly). Siegfried Kracauer aptly characterized most films made in Germany during the years directly leading up to the Nazi regime as being part of “a culture of distraction.”
THE FILM CONNOISSEUR Wilder had gone into films with the enthusiasm of a youthful fan and connoisseur, having enjoyed the American comedies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and the comical adventure films of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. But Wilder told Hellmuth Karasek that he was inspired to take the filmmaking profession seriously as an occupation by three brilliant and ambitious “art” films in particular:
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Sergei Eisenstein’s landmark Soviet silent drama Battleship Potemkin (1925), with its powerful use of montage and images of the kinds of outrages that lead to revolution; Wilder always cited the revealing shot of maggots in the sailors’ supposedly healthy meat as his model of a powerful close-up; René Clair’s groundbreaking French musical Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris, 1930), which experimented with graceful camerawork and a freer use of sound than was usual in the first talkies, as well as combining comedy and stark drama in the unsettling ways Wilder would always relish; and Leontine Sagan’s trenchant attack on Prussian education values, Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform, 1931), a passionate work of social criticism that served as an antimilitary allegory and dared to explore what it portrays as a potentially liberating but tentative lesbian relationship between a student and a teacher in a girls’ school.
Wilder admired Potemkin because of “the way the film jumps the audience by the throat as [Eisenstein] overwhelmed his audience”; Under the Roofs of Paris because Clair “showed me everything that is beautiful in life. . . . A tribute to optimism”; and Mädchen because of “the fact that the camera has no limits! . . . Suddenly, you feel compassion and sympathy for people you classified as ‘social outcasts.’ . . . The movie makes us compassionate.” But if Wilder thought he could make films like that as a lowly screenwriting apprentice in the German commercial system, he found he was mistaken. The times were against him, and the films to which he was assigned were in large part designed as the antithesis of challenging cinema.
A HELL OF A START Wilder’s screenwriting career (at least after he emerged from the status of ghostwriter) did not begin entirely inauspiciously. However ridiculous, the larkish silent film The Devil’s Reporter in 1929 (the title could also be translated as The Daredevil Reporter or A Hell of a Reporter) at least drew on his day job as a Racing Reporter with some tongue-in-cheek wit. Wilder sold the script to Paul Kohner, a native of Bohemia who ran the Universal Productions office in Berlin with producer Joe Pasternak, a Hungarian. They needed a script pronto for Ernst Laemmle to direct; “Uncle
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Carl’s” nephew had spent time in Hollywood, where he had been an assistant director for Lubitsch on the silent films Lady Windermere’s Fan and So This Is Paris. Kohner, like Wilder, would flee Hitler and establish himself as an important Hollywood figure. He ran a talent agency representing, among other illustrious directors, Wilder himself. Kohner also helped run a Hollywood fund to support fellow refugees from Nazis, a project crucial to saving many lives and one in which Lubitsch was importantly involved and to which Wilder contributed. Pasternak, who also took credit for giving Wilder his professional start, became a successful Hollywood producer of schmaltzy Deanna Durbin movies— one of which Wilder helped write without credit—and other conventional fare. As Wilder’s agent, Kohner came full circle with the director, arranging the financing for Fedora after Universal dropped its option on the project. When I asked Wilder if it was Kohner who set up the deal with a German tax-shelter group, the director said, “Yes, because he’s of that origin there and being the—how shall I say this?—Ingmar Bergman man [i.e., the celebrated Swedish director’s Hollywood agent], you know, the Big European Celluloid Connection. It was not difficult to set it up, but I just could not get the money here. Look, I can’t lose, because if this picture is a big hit [it wasn’t], it’s my revenge on Hollywood. If it is a total financial disaster, it’s my revenge for Auschwitz.” The Devil’s Reporter, which runs about an hour, is paced at breakneck speed, as an almost constant chase. The notion of a lowly rewrite man seizing the opportunity to act like a serial hero (or superhero, in today’s parlance) to rescue the bevy of comely American heiresses from a gang of kidnappers is amusing, at least in theory if not entirely in execution. Director Laemmle ably stages a variety of wild stunts on the streets of Berlin, giving a rapid tour of the metropolis suitable to someone of Wilder’s incorrigibly restless nature or for viewers who need to catch an early train. Eddie Polo spends most of the picture hanging off buildings and jumping in and out of cars and open-air buses. He is accompanied by an amusing copyboy sidekick, Maxe (Fred Grosser), who seems to have wandered in from a casting session for the upcoming production of Emil and the Detectives. Wilder correctly pointed out to me that Polo was too old to make such derring-do more than barely believable. Yet Wilder’s disenchantment with the first film to bear his name was so extreme that he grossly exaggerated Polo’s actual age when he said of The Devil’s Reporter, “Oh, it was bullshit,
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absolute bullshit. The leading man was an old Hungarian-American cowboy actor by the name of Eddie Polo, and he was already, by that time, seventyfive.” Polo was actually fifty-four. In addition to his movie background in both the United States and Germany, he was a former circus acrobat, a real-life daredevil, the first man to parachute from the Eiffel Tower. But as game as he is with his stunts in The Devil’s Reporter, the part should have gone to a man in his twenties. There are signs that the film recognizes its own absurdities, which is part of its not inconsiderable charm and chutzpah. By the climax, Eddie is calling in the rescue story with a phone in one hand and a gun in the other to hold off the bad guys, and The Devil’s Reporter becomes positively surreal in its silliness, like a Marx Bros. movie on steroids. The unlikely, suspiciously hasty happy ending showing Eddie, now a star reporter, winning the hand of the maidens’ attractive young teacher is a letdown by contrast. It would have been enough to show him as a successful, more confident reporter banging out another story with Maxe’s assistance. What seems to have bothered Wilder most about the film, however, is that he thought Polo was having an affair with his girlfriend, Olive Victoria. He wrote a poem about her, “Fifth from the Right,” for a Berlin newspaper, and many years later he confessed to Cameron Crowe that he “was just kind of haunted by her,” especially because she spoke very good English. That colored Wilder’s recollections of what is, by and large, a piece of unpretentious entertainment that could have led to his continuing to write zany comedies and other idiosyncratic films drawn from the personal storehouse of his highly varied journalistic background. Instead, when he was hired by UFA in 1930, he usually was assigned to operettas and other quasiLubitschean comedies that seem like pale imitations of the master. But first he and a group of young colleagues made the cheekily avant-garde classic People on Sunday, a film destined to be influential internationally, even though Wilder’s subsequent career in Germany went off in a much different direction.
“A FILM WITHOUT ACTORS” People on Sunday was conceived in June 1929 in a spirit of rebellion of the small group of tyro filmmakers against the commercial system. They challenged
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the enforced escapism that was the rule in mainstream German cinema, a reactionary tendency that militated against social commentary and realism. Daringly made as part-documentary, part-fiction, shot outside the studios on the streets and in the countryside around Berlin, the low-budget People on Sunday, principally written by Wilder, is a fascinating and influential hybrid. Directors Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer treat its low-key dramatic elements in the semidocumentary manner later identified with Italian neorealism; the loose, playful style also prefigures the French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave). The cast members (only one of whom had any professional experience) play characters drawn from their own lives, thrown together on a bittersweet weekend excursion. After the film was finished, no one wanted this off beat effort until an adventurous UFA executive named Hanns Brodnitz, senior manager for the company’s Berlin theaters, picked it up for distribution. The Berlin premiere of People on Sunday was held at the prestigious UFA-Theater am Kurfürstendamm on February 4, 1930. It instantly catapulted to fame Wilder and his remarkable group of collaborators on that “experiment,” at least within the artistic circles that paid attention to films and within the German industry. Although the public largely neglected People on Sunday, it was a critical sensation. UFA quickly snapped up Siodmak and Wilder, although to make more commercial fare. After Siodmak escaped from Germany in 1933 and spent time in Paris, he had a distinguished career in the United States on moody mystery and horror films and in film noir, a genre strongly influenced by German expressionism. Siodmak returned to work in Europe in the postwar era. Ulmer, a native of Czechoslovakia, went on a more eccentric path as a minimalist B-movie maker that made him a cult figure with his classic lowbudget noir Detour (1945) and other work on the margins of the industry in Hollywood, New York, and later back in Europe. Their remarkable array of collaborators on People on Sunday included cinematographer Eugen Shüfftan and assistant cameraman Fred Zinnemann, who also would go on to major careers in the United States. Before Ulmer worked on People on Sunday, he had already worked in Hollywood on Murnau’s masterpiece Sunrise (1927), assisting the German art director Rochus Gliese. Gliese was the original director of People on Sunday but quit a few days into the shooting. As often happens in filmmaking, but with even more rancor in the case of this landmark film, the principals gave out contradictory stories over the years
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in staking their various claims to credit. Kurt (later Curt) Siodmak, Robert’s brother, is credited for contributing to the writing of People on Sunday. As Curt he would become a popular novelist and screenwriter, best known for the classic horror film The Wolf Man (1941) and the novel and film Donovan’s Brain, but he was embittered by what he felt was the slighting by both his brother and Wilder of the extent of his involvement. Like others involved, Curt claimed to have helped finance the production, which was produced by Seymour Nebenzal and Moriz Seeler,* and he never ceased complaining about Wilder getting more prominent writing credit; I even had to listen to a harangue by Curt Siodmak on that subject when I expressed my appreciation for the film during the 1992 Los Angeles reception at which he was honored with Germany’s Order of Merit. Today, and with so many conflicting stories from the collaborators, it’s virtually impossible to make a definitive judgment on the film’s authorship beyond relying on the screen credits: “Manuskript: Billie Wilder, nach einer Reportage von Kurt Siodmak” (Script by Billy Wilder based on reportage by Kurt Siodmak). Wilder staked his share of claim at the time to the screenwriting credit in a pair of promotional newspaper articles published in Tempo (July 1929) and Der Montag Morgen (The Monday Morning, February 1930). “It was a miserable time. It was a great time,” he reported of their nine months of filming with “a completely ridiculous sum of money [about 28,000 marks, or $7,000, the equivalent of about $100,000 today] to deal with a few truths that seem important to us.” He wrote that the film originated in coffee-house discussions at the Romanisches Café among the young team about making something that would disregard commercial conventions to become “A film of Berlin, of its people, about the everyday things that we know so well.” The script, Wilder reported at the time, consisted of “seven typewritten pages.” The nonactress around whom the story revolves, Brigitte Borchert, was interviewed for a 2000 documentary film about the production, Weekend am Wannsee (Weekend at the Wannsee). She recalled witnessing daily story conferences among the collaborators: “They didn’t have a script or anything. And that’s how it went. . . . We’d sit at a nearby table while they’d decide what to do that day.” Ulmer’s recollection in 1970, however, was that “Billy Wilder
* Seymour Nebenzal’s father, Heinrich Nebenzahl (who spelled the family name differently), had helped arrange the funding for the film.
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wrote the script on pieces of scratch paper in the Romanisches Café.” Adding to the confusion, or legend, Wilder told Cameron Crowe that he had a copy of his script, written at the café, and it ran twenty-five pages. While drawing inspiration from the New Objectivity that refocused artistic attention from expressionism to ordinary life, People on Sunday partly imitated the format of the “city symphony” documentaries that had become fashionable in the late silent period for their panoramic perspectives on urban life. Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, 1927), was the obvious prototype, although Dziga Vertov’s Soviet film The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) is a superior example and was cited by Ulmer as a key influence. But People on Sunday, as its title indicates, becomes the diametrical opposite of those relatively impersonal works: a portrait of a city through intimate, anecdotal looks at some representative inhabitants. Like Wilder’s Eintänzer series, it seems like a documentary report but is fictionalized. It set out to tell what Wilder called in his Tempo article “a very, very simple story, quiet and yet full of melodies that sound for all of us daily. Without gags or punchlines. . . . The five people in this film are you and me.” Made at the very end of the silent period, People on Sunday was immediately recognized as a daring artistic experiment, a film that with its gritty blend of documentary and a slight narrative tried to reclaim some of the special qualities that had made the German industry the world leader in the 1920s, before many of its top figures, including Lubitsch and Murnau, were lured away by Hollywood. Aside from a few landmark films in the late 1920s, such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box, 1929), the German industry had fallen into relative artistic doldrums. The industry was now making mostly undistinguished formula pictures. A cultural malaise seemed to have taken over Berlin from the artistic daring and experimentation that characterized the immediate postwar years, inspired by the violent upheavals and desperation running amok throughout German society. But as relative calm was briefly restored before the Nazi storm, audiences and filmmakers alike indulged themselves in safely complacent, escapist entertainment that broke no dangerous new ground. This tendency owed much to the moderate economic recovery of the mid-1920s, with the stabilization of the German currency and an infusion of foreign capital.
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Although the recovery arrested the ruinous course of inflation that had caused the food shortages and exacerbated the political crises of that decade, it did not trickle very far down the economic ladder. People on Sunday reflects the caustic exposé approach of Wilder’s journalistic background in using a cross-section of Berliners to dramatize this socioeconomic situation from a more critical point of view than most newspapers allowed. The film shows the marginal life that ordinary working people were leading just after the start of the worldwide Great Depression, not much different from Wilder’s own as a struggling reporter in terms of lack of economic stability. By implication, People on Sunday casts serious and prescient doubt on Germany’s future. Average Berliners, portrayed onscreen by five young people in roles resembling their own lives (the one who had some prior cinematic experience was Christl Ehlers, but only as an extra), are shown to have just enough money to earn a bit of leisure time, one day a week to escape the daily grind. The film initially seems to focus on the rocky relationship of one couple, a roughlooking, coarse-acting cab driver played by Erwin Splettstösser (a round-faced fellow bearing something of a resemblance to Wilder), who quarrels with his girlfriend, a model named Annie Schreyer. In a scene displaying Wilder’s cinephilia (often an aspect of his work as a director as well), they vindictively tear apart a wall display of pictures of favorite film stars, destroying Erwin’s picture of Greta Garbo and Annie’s of Garbo’s onscreen and real-life lover John Gilbert. This hostile couple are separated when the depressed Annie chooses to sleep instead of going out on the Sunday jaunt; she winds up snoozing through almost the entire film. Instead, Erwin’s rakishly handsome friend Wolfgang von Waltershausen joins him to go hunting among the available girls they encounter, finding a pair of friends played by Ehlers and Borchert. The title is derived from the characters’ outing to the Wannsee, the lake on the outskirts of Berlin that served as a popular working-class weekend resort. The January 1942 meeting that established the implementation of the policies for the Holocaust, the Wannsee Conference, would take place in the same location, retrospectively throwing the shadow of historical catastrophe over the initially heedless but gradually downbeat proceedings onscreen. The Erwin-Annie domestic narrative scenes, somewhat flat and tedious, teasingly misdirect the viewer by proving not to be the thinly plotted film’s main focus. They are less compelling than the documentary-like glimpses of
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the characters on the streets of Berlin—especially a prolonged sequence of Wolfgang stalking Christl and finally picking her up at a trolley stop—and on their group outing to the Wannsee. The scenes at the resort include a charming montage of people posing for a still photographer, seen in freeze frames, one of the film’s seemingly impromptu touches that anticipate the French Nouvelle Vague. As Noah Isenberg comments, While [People on Sunday] continues to draw on the once dominant trend of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), with its visual riffs on popular advertising, design, photography, and technology, its main conceit is its utter resistance to prevailing modes and industry norms. The film turns its back on studio production, instead allowing the city and its many inviting locations (its boulevards and cafés, its lakes, boardwalks, beaches, and other places of leisure and recreation) to substitute for the standard sets, while at the same time allowing amateurs to play the kinds of roles otherwise reserved for film stars. . . . It is also very much an exploration, in line with Siegfried Kracauer’s [1930] study of Weimar Germany’s white-collar workers, The Salaried Masses, of the new cultural habits of the petit bourgeoisie.
In the course of their Sunday “frolic,” the wholesome-looking, nineteenyear-old blonde Brigitte becomes the film’s central character, the first true Billy Wilder heroine, a prototype of Shirley MacLaine’s Fran Kubelik in The Apartment, another film about sexual exploitation of a young woman by a heartless man in a big city. Brigitte, a gramophone salesgirl recruited by producer Seeler from an actual record store on the Kurfürstendamm, is the most appealing performer in People on Sunday. Sweet-natured and lissome, her character has an open, modern attitude about sex that gets her into some trouble. The primary focus of the ensemble piece is on the seduction of this naive, warm-hearted young woman by the suave and handsome young man Brigitte aptly calls “Wolf.” Several years older than her, with varied occupations including Eintänzer, he manipulates her for sexual purposes. He opportunistically shifts his attention from her friend Christl after she slaps him when he tries to kiss her. But Christl nevertheless comes to resent his dalliance in the woods with Brigitte, whom she had introduced as “my best friend.”
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Brigitte’s obliquely portrayed sex scene with Wolf is justly famous for its inversion of the cinema’s romantic expectations. As Wolf rolls on top of her, Shüfftan’s camera starts panning away while they loll back on the ground. The camera sweeps up along the trees, mockingly initiating the clichéd shorthand of ecstasy familiar from countless films. But in this wry imitation of a Lubitsch Touch, the camera tilts down sardonically to a pile of discarded cans and other trash (anticipating Lubitsch’s mocking intercutting of a lovers’ tryst with a garbage gondola at the beginning of his 1932 romantic comedy Trouble in Paradise). As the camera resumes panning slowly back along the trees to the couple in the woods, suggesting the passage of time although ambiguously with this unbroken shot, it reveals the narcissistic Wolf standing fully dressed, looking down as Brigitte sprawls on the ground, engaging in a postcoital nap. She wakes and looks longingly at him, but her mood is disrupted by finding a pine cone under her rear end (Wilder biographer Maurice Zolotow, determined to make him seem crass, inaccurately claims it is “a rusty can of sardines,” evidently mixing up the pine cone with the earlier glimpse of discarded cans). The two young lovers laugh over the symbolic impediment to their happiness, and Brigitte straightens out her underwear, leaving little doubt as to what has happened, even if the unbroken shot offers the filmmakers a teasing form of plausible deniability. As the foursome use a pedaldrive boat to return to the big city, with Brigitte unabashedly smitten, Wolf proves himself even more of a cad, already flirting with two other girls they pass on the lake. Christl, though with a gloating look, puts her arm around the disappointed Brigitte in consolation. Along with that double personal betrayal and the twist back to a chastened form of ambiguous female friendship/rivalry, a complex development of sexual intrigue that provides the first memorable traces of Wilder’s personality on film, the concluding scenes of People on Sunday are unrelentingly grim in their implications. The five subjects return to their drone-like lives in the city, with the emotionally wounded Brigitte making an unsuccessful attempt to prolong her brief encounter with Wolf, who instead makes plans with Erwin to go to a soccer game the following Sunday. Male bonding takes precedence over romance, as it sometimes does in Wilder, but always with an edge of disenchantment rather than the celebratory tone of so many Hollywood films in which buddy-buddy bromance is depicted.
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The characters’ final submersion back into the crowd (the film has similarities to King Vidor’s 1928 MGM masterpiece, The Crowd, which Wilder quotes directly in The Apartment) demonstrates in socioeconomic terms exactly how pitiful, and cruelly illusory, their brief release into the countryside actually has been. In large, didactic titles, intercut with documentary shots of the characters and masses of other Berliners returning to their jobs and schools, the film spells out its social message: wieder Arbeit [Back to work]. wieder Alltag [Back to everyday life]. wieder Woche [The week again]. 4 Millionen [Four million people] warten [waiting] auf [for] den nächsten [next] Sonntag [Sunday]. Ende. [The End]
Berliner Tageblatt reviewer Eugen Szatmari, like most of his colleagues, found the guerrilla style of the enterprise a refreshing antidote to the typical German studio production: “Young people got together and, with laughably little means, without sets or ballrooms or opera galas, without stars, with a few human beings they drew from their professions, they shot a film and achieved a total success, for which one has to congratulate them and which hopefully will finally open up the eyes of the film industry.” Unfortunately, those hopes were not to be fulfilled, because the contrasting economic and political imperatives dominating the German film industry were too strong. Wilder also blamed their film’s commercial failure on the fact that, because of its low budget, it was a silent when the industry was already largely converted to sound. Ironically, though, it was the critical success of the avant-garde People on Sunday that gave Wilder the cachet to enter the commercial industry that the low-budget film was designed to critique and counteract. The production companies were not interested in replicating the kind of experimental succès d’estime Wilder and his collaborators had with People on Sunday. As Wilder put it, “And so we had to go back to what the studios thought had a chance to make some profit. Our idea of doing pictures on a slightly higher level fell on its face.” They were absorbed into it much as their characters were absorbed back into the workaday world of the big city, though without suffering their anonymity and lack of success.
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While the commercial films Wilder wrote for UFA rarely attempt the resolutely unconventional, even confrontational art-film tone of People on Sunday, and some are little more than hackwork, his overall output at Germany’s leading studio is better than he liked to remember. Despite the many obstacles he faced in that system, which militated against originality and social criticism, Wilder did his best to slip his brand of mordant fatalism, harsh realism, and bittersweet poignancy into the cracks of the plots he was handed. As a fledgling screenwriter with little clout, he had no hope of being able to transform the films entirely but managed to score intermittent successes that, especially when seen in the context of the time, are impressive enough achievements.
IN THE “POISON LABORATORY” UFA in the pre-Nazi period was controlled by the powerful businessman and media mogul Alfred Hugenberg, who acquired a majority interest in the foundering company in 1927 and transferred it to Nazi ownership after the party took power in 1933. Hugenberg said in 1927 that his goal with his newspapers and other media interests was to “bring back to the national cause” wavering elements in the country “or to hold them to the national track.” Hugenberg had been chairman of the supervisory board of Krupp Steel, part of the leading German armaments company, Friederich Krupp AG. He was a major far-right supporter of Hitler and when the Nazis took power would become a member of the chancellor’s cabinet, although he was quickly forced to resign over his policy disputes with Hitler. In the period before the Nazi takeover, Hugenberg gave orders to churn out light film entertainments designed to downplay the severity of the country’s economic problems and peddle what seems in retrospect an irrational optimism. Those who worked for Hugenberg were viewed with disfavor by activists such as Willi Münzenberg, a labor organizer who declared that the revolutionary workers’ movement should focus on Hugenberg’s film enterprises more than on his bourgeois press holdings: “Hugenberg’s film activity is a hundred times more dangerous than his newspapers. Very few workers read the Hugenberg papers, but millions of workers see the nationalistic and counterrevolutionary films from Hugenberg’s poison laboratory.”
Praise for BILLY WILDER: DANCING ON THE EDGE “Only Joseph McBride could have given us Billy Wilder in such fullness, as he’s done previously with Lubitsch, Ford, and other masters. The breadth of research is staggering, yet it is always placed at the service of McBride’s free ruminative style, unbound by dutiful chronological study—instead, we have a sensibility, and a conversation. By placing the production histories and legacies of collaboration into the widest possible historical frame, McBride reanimates Wilder’s life and art, returning us to the masterpieces to see them with fresh eyes, and hungry to discover the films we’ve missed.” J O N AT H A N L E T H E M , author of The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. “With his walk-on-the-dark-side comedies and refusal to sentimentalize, Wilder’s reputation has only grown with time, and this magisterial critical study does full justice to his complex talent. McBride draws stunning connections between the life and the art, and his discussion of Wilder’s treatment of women is especially fresh and persuasive. Both massive and entertaining, this is a must-read for Wilder fans.” M O L LY H A S K E L L , film critic and author “A superb study of Billy Wilder and an ideal companion to McBride’s recent How Did Lubitsch Do It? This book is rich with information about the Viennese/Weimar culture that helped shape Wilder and wonderfully attentive to his artistry. It’s the best critical account of a great filmmaker, showing exactly how he did it.” J A M E S N A R E M O R E , author of More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts “The most complete and profound study of Billy Wilder to date, one in which the work and the life illuminate each other and two worlds that seemed separate are joined and complemented with unsuspecting coherence. A book that brings us closer to Wilder, humanizing and explaining him like no other.” F E R N A N D O T R U E B A , director of Belle Époque “Joseph McBride is one of the best film critics and historians. His Billy Wilder is a crowning achievement. He casts considerable new light on Wilder’s early life in Vienna and Berlin and reevaluates his artistic status, including his great later work. The cliché of Wilder as cynic and misanthrope is not to McBride’s taste. Instead, he reveals the complexity of the man and the coherence of his eclectic oeuvre.” M I C H E L C I M E N T, editor of Positif FILM AND C ULTUR E S E R IE S ISBN: 978-0-231-20146-9
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C U P. C O L U M B I A . E D U PRIN TED IN TH E U .S.A .