On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  Von Stroheim, both the monster and the man, appealed greatly to Billie Wilder. Billie had given Greed a decidedly mixed review when he saw it at a Berlin repertory theater back in July of 1928. Referring to Greed’s outrageous premiere, Wilder wrote: “None of the old indignation about this cruel, naturalistic representation of human baseness is felt anymore. One follows, with a depressing feeling, this description of human beings that constantly offers the seamier side of the usual onscreen fate. But it’s also one-sided and full of meaningless symbols.” Still, Billie found one element of Greed impressive because of its intensity and urgency: “an agitating portrait of a woman’s soul, in which the greed for money awakens all her bad instincts…. It’s not relaxing to watch this movie, but it’s still a delight, even if it’s of a different sort than usual.”

  But now, Billie was just coming off his own first go-round with moviemaking, and von Stroheim’s troubles struck a more resonant chord. Von Stroheim was simply called “Von” in Hollywood, Wilder wrote, adding that the Americans pronounce “Von” like one. Why one? Wilder explained that this was because Hollywood studios can only make one movie with von Stroheim; afterward, they go bankrupt. “That’s the great thing about von Stroheim—for fifteen years they’ve gone bankrupt over him. Still, they keep him—the way one keeps cactuses and decadent greyhounds….” Wilder continued: “Greed was given exactly one day at the Ufa-Palast. There has never been such a film scandal before in Berlin. People were taken aback—he was five years ahead of us. Quite independently from the Russians, he filmed in the Russian style even before the Russians did. He anticipated something like montage. He filmed associatively. And he unmasked reality for the first time: this is the way a wedding really is; this is the way a funeral really is. George Grosz types stand there, their brutal thoughts visible on their foreheads. Von Stroheim enthralls them.”

  Billie made special note of von Stroheim’s latest film, Queen Kelly, which starred the glamorous and fabulously successful Gloria Swanson: “La Swanson is playing the madam of a brothel; the movie will be great.” On this point, Billie’s prediction proved to be far off the mark. Plagued with production and financing problems, Queen Kelly was never finished, let alone released, though a small amount of impressive footage finally saw the light of day in 1950.

  Wilder’s appreciative interest in crazy Erich von Stroheim and his overproduced masterpieces stood in marked contrast to his opinion of the movies being made in Berlin at the time. Von Stroheim was mad, but he had guts. Most so-called directors were either gutless hacks or, like Murnau and Lubitsch, had already moved to Hollywood. “It was a shallow time in German pictures,” he said. “The big companies that were making pictures—they were kind of lost in schmaltz.” Still, there were so many production companies and, theoretically, so many opportunities for young writers that Billie kept pursuing his nascent career as best he could. Dominating his dreams was the gargantuan Ufa, where most of the action took place. With over a thousand employees and an enormous annual production slate, Ufa was the biggest film company outside of Hollywood. Its extensive business offices were located in Potsdamer Platz, Kochstrasse, and Dönhoffplatz, while its vast production facilities lay outside of Berlin in the suburbs of Babelsberg and Tempelhof. There were many smaller studios in Germany, too, but the fantastically powerful Ufa remained at the top of the heap, largely because Ufa, like the big Hollywood studios, had a firm grip on exhibition. The company owned a large number of theaters and thus maintained control over its own built-in market, and the smaller studios had trouble competing.

  By the time Wilder was in a position to sell his own scripts, some of the artistic wind had been taken out of Ufa’s sails, thanks to the German economy as well as shifts in popular tastes. As the film historian Thomas Elsaesser describes it, German cinema of the mid-1920s was a paradox—“a financial disaster and a filmmakers’ Mecca.” Fighting against competition from Hollywood, Ufa attempted to limit film imports; the German domestic market was so lucrative that Ufa wanted to protect it for itself. At the same time, the head of production at Ufa, Erich Pommer, embarked on a series of ambitious prestige pictures that brought German filmmaking to new levels of art and bankruptcy: Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (1924) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1925–26) foremost among them. Immoderately beautiful and expensive, Metropolis in particular put an unbearable strain on Ufa’s financial resources, and Pommer’s artistic ambitions were largely to blame (though he was a handy scapegoat as well). Pommer had a nose for superb talent, and as the critic Stefan Grossmann put it at the time, “as we all know, a good nose is sometimes worth more than a good head for figures.”

  In 1925, Ufa signed a contract with Paramount Pictures and Loews, Inc. (the parent company of MGM) as part of a loan arrangement to the tune of $4 million. Highly problematic for the Germans, the so-called Parufamet agreement forced Ufa to open up its theater chains to imported Paramount and MGM films to the point that as many as 75 percent of the films shown in Ufa’s ninety-nine theaters had to be from Hollywood. At the same time, only twenty Ufa films could be released in the United States every year, but even then this small selection of films was released solely at the discretion of Paramount and MGM executives. If Ufa’s movies were not to Hollywood’s tastes, then Hollywood was under no obligation to release them. Most were not.

  By 1926, the double-barreled disaster of the Parufamet contract coupled with the commercial failure of Metropolis brought Ufa back to the brink of bankruptcy. When Metropolis was in its sixth month of production, Pommer left for Hollywood; Lang’s gargantuan film wouldn’t be released for another year. In the mid-1920s, Pommer had championed German national cinema as a distinct alternative to Hollywood, and yet he also believed that this native German cinema could compete (to however limited a degree) with American films on American soil. Part of the huge expense of such films as Die Nibelungen, Der letzte Mann, Tartüff, Faust, and Metropolis was supposed to be offset by American box office returns, but the returns never materialized. So Pommer left Germany for Hollywood. He produced two films in the States: Barbed Wire, a love story between a French peasant girl and a German prisoner of war, and another wartime romance—Hotel Imperial. In the latter film, an Austrian officer falls in love with a chambermaid in the Polish town of Lemberg, then under Russian occupation.

  In the meantime, in the politics of the film industry and German national political circles alike, talk began to turn to the question of why Germany was being forced to suffer humiliation after humiliation at the greedy hands of other, more prosperous nations. Hollywood was rolling in profits; Ufa’s losses ran at about $12 million per year. Creditors demanded a solution, and they found one—in the wax-mustachioed form of Alfred Hugenberg, a sort of Nazi Rupert Murdoch, who owned a newspaper chain, a news service, and an ad agency. (True, Hugenberg was the leader of the German National People’s Party, not the National Socialists, but he allied himself with the Nazis, and he was most reactionary politically.) Backed by Ruhr financiers, Hugenberg purchased the troubled Ufa and assumed direct control. He did not, however, turn the studio into a propaganda source—not yet, anyway. What he did do was make speeches, including this one in 1928: “We shall form a united front if we can only let the iron clasp of our philosophy pull us together and in its embrace melt down everything that is soft and fluid in us and recast it as stone. Anyone who would stand in our way will have to step aside or be melted down, too.”

  Hugenberg promptly renegotiated the Parufamet contract to much more favorable terms for Ufa. Pommer returned from the United States and, under the watchdog general-producership of Ernst Hugo Corell, reassumed his position as head of production. From Hollywood, Pommer brought back to Germany a new appreciation of the commercial value of popular culture. Pommer continued to make grade-A motion pictures, but they were no longer of the radical sort. Pommer’s tastes had veered away from overtly arty projects like Metropolis toward broader, more crowd-pleasing entertainments.

  For aspiring young filmmakers watc
hing from the sidelines as German cinema appeared to decline, the time was right to offer a challenge, both financially and aesthetically. Some of these youthful cineasts wanted to use the cinema the way von Stroheim did, only cheaper. They wanted to get right to the hot heart of life. They were going to show Berliners how they really lived. Billie and his café friends spent a good deal of time talking about the problem, and they concluded that in order to experience the reality of city life in Berlin—no, not merely experience it, but film it (and therefore experience it on a higher plane)—one had to go to the parks on a Sunday. Berlin was grimy, but it was also a city of green. The Berliner Forst, the banks of the Havel River and the Tegeler See; Treptower Park, the Spree, Köpenick; the immense Grunewald and the Schlachtensee; the Nikolassee and Wannsee … To the north, south, east, and west of their dirty, industrial city, Berliners could find earthly, urban-idyllic solace, and if they didn’t want to travel far they could just stroll through the lovely Tiergarten in the center of town.

  At the time, Ufa was churning out an array of pictures, from elaborate costume dramas and escapist comedies to lower-key dramas about city life and ersatz documentaries known as “cross-section” films. Erich Pommer was making more fluff than he had made before, but he was also helping to spur a broad push toward a kind of street realism. Even Joe May, one of Ufa’s most commercially minded, crowd-pleasing directors, had moved into a gritty urban phase with his 1928 big-budget production of Asphalt. A decade earlier, May had directed a 20-million-mark extravaganza called Das Indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb), a huge production featuring tigers, turbans, and what looked like the entire Indian subcontinent, but now May deferred to the Zeitgeist and made a melodrama of the streets. His film opened with a printed intertitle: “Asphalt—pavements—the pounding of muscle and sweat and iron to make a path for man: a smooth path—an asphalt path—feet—wheels—the rumble and roar, the hiss and shriek, the clangor and clamor of a city—moving—endlessly flowing—like life itself.”

  Cross-section films were, if anything, even closer to the pavement. They were compilation films fashioned out of vignettes of what was (or at least could be passed off as) the common man’s common life. Cross-section movies were scarcely limited to Ufa and Germany. All over Europe, directors were trying to capture the flavor of industrialized urban life through montage. Alberto Cavalcanti’s Parisian Rien que les heures (1926), Dziga Vertov’s Soviet The Man with the Movie Camera (1928), and Joris Ivens’s Dutch films The Bridge (1927) and Rain (1929) were conscious attempts both to stylize the documentary form and to make the form more real—to bring out the essence of urban reality by splicing fragments of it together creatively on film. Cross-section films were doing just fine at the box office, too. Urban audiences from Paris to Moscow absolutely loved seeing themselves on-screen.

  Berlin’s first entry in the cross-section genre was Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (Berlin: The Symphony of a Great City) in 1927. The inspiration had been Carl Mayer’s. Mayer had grown weary of fiction and he was bored with studio filmmaking. He wanted to write something harder—something that cut through the fakery to expose the real. The Kammerspielfilme he pioneered—the small, closely observed dramas like Genuine, Die Hintertreppe, Scherben, Sylvester, and Vanina—were no longer interesting to him. So he began writing a movie in and of the streets of Berlin. Karl Freund shot it, Walter Ruttmann edited it, and like so many of Mayer’s works, Berlin was both an artistic and financial triumph. The ensuing gush of money attracted the attention of other film producers, as money tends to do. After all, cross-section films, as the critic Siegfried Kracauer noted, “could be produced at low cost, and they offered a gratifying opportunity of showing much and revealing nothing.” (Kracauer is typically bitter and remarkably unperceptive on this point.)

  Structurally, the films were supposed to be loose. What might seem to be a mistake in a tightly planned, slickly photographed fiction film could come across as a fortuitous accident in a fake documentary—a glimpse of real life in all its messy glory. Ruttmann, Ivens, Vertov, and Cavalcanti were genuine documentarians, but Ufa’s producers knew a good thing when they saw it, and they began gluing together cross-section films with abandon. They even threw in random stock footage—anything, as long as it played. In fact, in 1929 Ufa went so far as to produce several cross-section films composed entirely of clips from old romances and adventure films. Applauded not only by audiences but, even more importantly, also by the tight-fisted producers who gave out writing and directing assignments, cross-section films were all the rage in 1929. Wilder and his café pals figured (correctly) that they could make one, too. Billie would write it.

  It was a diverse little group. Moritz Seeler, thirty-five years old, had founded the avant-garde theater group Junge Bühne in 1921. Seeler had mounted productions of Brecht’s Baal and Arnolt Bronnen’s Patricide, but now he wanted to be a movie producer. Robert Siodmak, twenty-eight, was the son of a furrier-banker from Galicia, though he’d actually been born in Memphis, Tennessee, during one of his father’s business trips. Siodmak had been a stage actor and a translator of silent-movie intertitles, and he’d also worked as a film editor and an assistant director. Currently working as an ad man for the magazine Neue Revue, Siodmak also had some family connections he wanted to mine: his uncle, Heinrich Nebenzahl, was a film producer who specialized in action-adventure movies.

  Curt Siodmak, twenty-seven, was Robert’s younger brother, a fledgling reporter. Eugen Schüfftan, thirty-six, was much more experienced than anyone else in the circle, having invented a method of process photography that used mirrors to mix live action, front projection, and miniatures. The system bore his name—the Schüfftan Process—and was used to magnificent effect in the groundbreaking, bank-breaking Metropolis. More recently, Schüfftan had created the special effects for an Ufa film called Narkose, featuring a flashback sequence gorgeously contained in a single drop of water. Edgar Ulmer, twenty-five, had worked as a production design assistant on Murnau’s elaborate Hollywood film, Sunrise; he’d also done set designs for Max Reinhardt as well as for some low-budget Universal Pictures westerns. And to complete the team, Schüfftan brought in a good little gofer: a former music and law student who had been trained as a cinematographer in Paris and had worked as the cameraman’s assistant on Dietrich’s Ich Küsse Ihre Hand, Madame (I Kiss Your Hand, Madame). Fred Zinnemann was all of twenty-two years old.

  A frightening amount of creativity and ambition was sitting around those café tables weighing forth on the subject of how to make the movie, but the group still didn’t have a director. So through the agency of Moritz Seeler, Billie met with a man named Rochus Gliese, who could legitimately claim to have designed both Der Golem and Sunrise, the latter assignment having garnered him one of the first set of Academy Award nominations for scenic design. Gliese had directed films before, too, including Der verlorene Schatten (The Lost Shadow) and Komödie des Herzens (Comedy of the Heart, cowritten with Murnau). Flattered by the attention Billie and the others showered upon him, Gliese agreed to direct the film, with Robert Siodmak serving as his assistant.

  This was a talented group of filmmakers—so talented that they never agreed on anything. They battled at the time, and the skirmishes continued in their memoirs and the many subsequent interviews they gave after reaching fame and fortune independently of one another. For example, who paid for Menschen am Sonntag? Pick your answer: Robert Siodmak said he asked for a loan of 5,000 marks from Uncle Heinrich; Wilder and Siodmak both said Nebenzahl came through with the cash; Curt Siodmak said no, Nebenzahl only gave them fifty marks. Curt himself claimed credit for providing most of the money. The film had a budget of 9,000 marks (about $2,500), and according to Curt, he financed most of the film himself because he had just sold a book to the newspaper Die Woche for 12,000 marks. Edgar Ulmer, on the other hand, always said that he paid for most of it with his recent Hollywood windfall. Wilder, meanwhile, reported that he sweet-talked some guy he met on Friedrichstrasse into paying for t
he balance left after Heinrich Nebenzahl’s advance.

  Who wrote Menschen am Sonntag? Curt Siodmak: “I was trying to find a story that could be made into a film Robert could direct—his most ardent wish. A writer can get a break by writing a successful story or a book. But how does a director get his chance? He first needs a ‘vehicle,’ a story, which I hoped to supply for Robert, since he was brother, father figure, and family to me.” Robert Siodmak: Curt never wrote anything down and Billie Wilder only wrote a single gag. Edgar Ulmer: “Billie Wilder did not write a true script. We would have one drink in the tavern and say, ‘Next Sunday we will do this and this.’ We had a plot thread and defined characters. Our main weapon was that each person was responsible for his own part—even the assistant, Zinnemann, could join in the conversation.” Curt Siodmak: “Robert reluctantly put my name on the credits, but in such small lettering that it seems to underline Billie Wilder’s name—’After an idea by Curt Siodmak.’ For Robert, one Siodmak’s prominence in the film business—his—was quite sufficient. He never lost that obsession of sibling rivalry to the end of his life.”

  Here is the actress Brigitte Borchert on the subject of the script for Menschen am Sonntag: “Nothing written ever appeared. Often, we had to wait a long time in the morning in an outdoor restaurant between the railway station and the Wannsee swimming pool until the gentlemen of the shooting team worked out the day’s scenes at the next table. They also debated during the many involuntary pauses that occurred because we could only shoot in sunlight. Even during the shooting, [Robert] Siodmak would shout instructions to us, things that had come to him in a flash.”

  The only member of the Menschen am Sonntag creative team to avoid seizing credit after the fact was Fred Zinnemann, who claimed that his own job was mainly to carry the camera around for Eugen Schüfftan and stay out of trouble. Zinnemann described Billie Wilder, most recognizably, as having been “a highly strung young man” who (like everyone else in the production with the notable exception of himself) was as good at causing problems as he was at solving them. According to Zinnemann, Siodmak, Wilder, and the rest of the production team were forced to travel to the locations on public transportation because none of them owned cars and it cost far too much to hire them. (What happened to Billie’s old Chrysler? you may well ask. He may not have owned it yet.) This presented its own set of problems, especially when the filmmakers got into one of their frequent tiffs on a Berlin bus: “In the evening, Billie and Siodmak took the exposed negative to the laboratory to be developed. One day they got into an argument and walked angrily off the bus, leaving the negative behind them—three days’ work which was never seen again and had to be reshot.”