The opening title, "A film by and for amateurs," is a disarming and charming lead-in to what is in fact an astonishing first film by several artists who were soon to become Berlin exiles, and launched into successful careers in France and Hollywood: directors Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer; Billy Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kurt Siodmak; and cinematographers Eugen Schufftan and Fred Zinnemann. There is a timeless freshness about People on Sunday, a film most easily described in comparison to such late-Italian neorealist films as Sunday in August (PFA, June '87). It too deals, with unpretentious humor, with how the working class spends its leisure time, in telling of a taxi driver and his pal, a traveling salesman, who join two young women for a picnic leaving the taxi-driver's wife at home to sleep away her Sunday. After swimming, snoozing, and flirting, the four depart friends, ready to return to the drudgery of everyday life. Although implicit in its attitude is the spiritual emptiness of industrialized society-making leisure time at once more impossible and more crucial to obtain-the film portrays these characters with a kind of joyful respect. It wasn't hard to do, since all were playing themselves: the day after shooting, the taxi driver returned to his taxi, the shopgirl to her shop. Incipient aspects of all the artists can be detected in People on Sunday: a Wilderesque spat between husband and wife in which each tears up the others' movie-fan photos (his of Garbo, hers of Willi Frisch) climaxes over a Siodmak-like issue of an all-important hat, and how it should be worn. Eugen Schufftan's atmospheric effects and Ulmer's angular ballet of shadows can also be detected in the city street scenes.