"In 1933, what was then called, with metaphor moviegoer, the Berlin-Vienna train was bringing Hollywood to the capital of American cinema, dall'incalzante fleeing Nazism, people like Billy Wilder (who in this case, made a stop in Paris) and as Fritz Lang, who from day to day, in front of Goebbels' invitation to become the head of the Ufa film, packed his bags and left. In London, but stops, leaving a wife and a daughter, Vienna, Friedrich Bergmann, a great Austrian director invited fictional invention, to shoot in a London studio insipid love story between a prince in disguise and a flower named Prater Violet . What is the title of the novel "on the" film that Christopher Isherwood wrote and published in 1945 in memory of the tragic 1933 when the world began to fall into the abyss of World War II. But Christopher Isherwood is Christopher Isherwood, a triumph of lightness, master dell'allusione, a fake reporter to real as possible (in the case of this story is almost true, and actually lived) in which he, the narrator, a mo 'of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, comes only in profile, with the grace of a boy of good family, good education and good feelings, that does not interfere in what he sees happening under his nose. The same style, human and literary, which had used the stories to which it owes its fame, those Goodbye to Berlin, where, again, Isherwood is the witness, the voyeur, the observer, the friend called to resolve worries and troubles of mind also dramatic. But never center stage, leaving, in the stories of Berlin, the great deceiver and small spy Mr. Norris and the now legendary Sally Bowles destined to great popularity, forty years later, with Cabaret. Giorgio Manganelli
As noted in his afterword period, Isherwood is "a connoisseur of fatuity, sottise an expert, a connoisseur of gossip." But at the same time is "fascinated by the tragedy." So Prater Violet (Adelphi) begins as a commentary on frivolous working on a movie that nobody wants to do (those who feel the need of yet another musical about a poor girl, a prince in disguise and then exile and the triumph of Central Europe?) to fall sharply, even with all the softness of Isherwood, in the tragedy of Nazism. Here, then, that the young Isherwood, less than thirty years old but already an expert on German things, just back from Berlin will be convened with urgency typical of this film by factotum Chatsworth, producer, who dreams of achieving a Tosca played by Garbo and written by Somerset Maugham, and instead it only for hands Prater Violet, the still inexperienced as a writer and Isherwood Bergmann, the great director more or less in exile, working of course obtorto neck. Between what is described as "the Socrates jew" with a face like a Roman emperor and the young apprentice writer bursts the sympathy, which allows them to carry on this insane project. And as (I quote Manganelli) 'in a distant, apparently, cruel reality atrocious events occur: Nazi Germany celebrates the process for the' burning of the Reichstag, in Austria the civil war destroyed the workers' militias: the gun, hangs himself ... is coming to a horrible war, "on the outskirts of London we are fiddling in the shadows of the cinema. And, for once abandoning his traditional ironic aplomb, Isherwood, about love, his love, his love of the moment, which is hidden under the letter J. And that, in the book, curiously has no gender - even if we know that the preferences of Isherwood, as his bosom friend and fellow American exile WH Auden, were homosexual. There is a sudden gap, a change in tone from light to play in these last few pages of a book done, apparently, of nothing, but which is in line with all its frivolity and their accuracy in the picture, the environment, to heavyweights in the world of cinema as The Last Tycoon, The disenchanted , The Day of the Locust. "The movie businesses of today are nothing more than a palace of the sixteenth century. One sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the insidious scheming, ambitious ... There is the craziest dissipation and more narrow-minded on matters of economics a little money ... Ci sono segreti che tutti conoscono e di cui nessuno parla...». Non basta? Lieve, ma vero. Per i curiosi: Bergmann si chiamava nella realtà Berthold Viertel, il film Little Friend , la casa produttrice era la British Gaumont. E l'androgino amore tale Heinz." (da Irene Bignardi, Film e tragedie, la dolce leggerezza di Isherwood , "La Repubblica", 19/02/'11)
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