Film at Lincoln Center Presents Siodmak
Great Filmmaker
By: Susan Hall - Dec 10, 2024
Film at Lincoln Center presents a Robert Siodmak retrospective from December 11 to December 19. Siodmak, according to his 98-year-old brother (with whom he worked),spent his entire life in film studios and on location. Robert made films in many different genres. Yet he is best known, and not well-enough known, for his contributions to the film noir form.
His first venture as a director was the recently re-created People on Sunday, where five non-actors respond to improvised direction as the film proceeds. Billie (later Billy) Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, and Edgar Ullman also participated in this film. They fled Germany when Hitler gained power.
This portrait of Berlin after the First World War and before Hitler’s ascension to power, portrays a city welcoming normalcy and adapting to casual romantic encounters, bathing suits and life on an off-work day. The featured young women have the individuality and force we find in all of Siodmak’s women.
The Wannsee beach shown in this film is accessible by U-Bahn and S-Bahn today, just twenty minutes from the center of the city.. It was also the setting of the conference that determined the mass extermination of Jews.
People on Sunday, like all his fims in various genres, bears a distinctive Siodmak imprint. He had a marvelous sense of light, framing and timing.
Siobmak’s women stand out. For a man who spent most of his life focused in a hothouse atmosphere creating new work, he understood women deeply. Struggling to express ambition, new careers and a family/work mix, women were often left to distinguish themselves as bad girls. The noir woman is indeed bad. She is often criminal, left to abandon romance for big bucks and sometimes even murder.
What were American bad girls doing at this time? Lucy Bigelow Rosen, who came to be known as the grand dame of Caramoor, an elegant music festival held in Katonah New York, wanted to be an actress. She ran away from home and landed in London between the two great wars. She came to her senses, returned to America, married a Jewish man, acceptable because he was rich, and settled into domesticity, her flaming red hair an announcement of what she had once been. Noel Coward’s song gave the warning, “Don’t put your daughter on the stage.”
The stage is the least of it for bad girls in Siodmak’s films. We may never know what the families of bad women thought of their offspring, but we can come to know these women, brought to screen life by Ava Gardner, Yvonne de Carlo, Gone with the Wind’s good girl Olivia de Havilland, and Barbara Stanwick in the Siodmak films. It took Blaxploitation and characters played by Pam Grier to bring these bad girls up to good status.
Siodmak’s first color film featured Maria Montez the "Caribbean cyclone" who Siodmak reported “could not act from here to there.” Her contemporary Mickey Madison in Sean Baker’s Anora does a fabulous butt dance. Monrez’ trance dance is riveting. Bad girls can be very bad.
Tickets here.