cabaret (d. bob fosse, w. joe masteroff, john van druten, christopher isherwood, jay allen)

Germany, interwar. So much of my reading and watching seems to return to these times. Whilst there is a personal connection to pre-war Berlin, it is also disconcerting the way in which interwar Germany seems to resemble contemporary western society. The culture wars and the xenophobia. The hankering for a strong leader which goes above and beyond a hankering for democracy. The societal petri dish which leads to fascism is always latent, but these days the ingredients feel more combustible than ever. Cabaret, the film of a musical inspired by a book written by Isherwood, who must have been jotting down notes in the clubs and beer gardens and parks he would have frequented, does a sterling job of capturing Berlin in the thirties. A heightened, musical Berlin with a shadow hanging over it. How many of these english speaking German characters would be dead a decade later? Would Fritz and Natalia manage to flee? Would Maximilian end up dead on the eastern front? It’s a curious film in so far as the fate of the lead protagonists, no matter the scrapes they get into, seem to have less jeopardy than that of the secondary characters. Minelli is barnstormingly brilliant. I once, in another life, saw her perform two nights in a row at the Royal Albert Hall. Presumably singing many of the songs from this film. What stays with me most, however, is how the two nights were carbon copies, even down to the supposed ad-libs. Minelli was a meticulous pro. That quest for perfection underscores her representation of Sally Bowles. She appears to capture her character’s comic timing and apparent chaos effortlessly - something that suggests there must have been a world of effort involved.  Fosse choreographs the whole film, not just the dance sequences. The editing is sharp to the point of jagged. The rollercoaster ride reflects the rollercoaster lives that everyone was living in those dangerous days, both exhilarating and ghosted by imminent terror. 

prater violet (christopher isherwood)

Who says there’s anything new under the sun? The notion of auto-ficcion is sometimes bandied around as a post-modern concept, but here’s a resolutely modernist Isherwood constructing a novel wherein the central character is one Christopher Isherwood and reads for all the world like a piece of non-fiction. The conceit helps to lend authenticity to a minor text, which describes the author’s experiences as a screenwriter working for a Viennese film director, Friedrich Bergmann, (modelled on the real life director Berthold Viertel), contracted by a British studio to make the powder puff movie. The details of movie making in the thirties are enjoyable and suggest a world that hasn’t changed all that much. In the first decade of this century I spent a fair amount of time drifting around the edges of the old film world in Soho and the characters who crop up in Prater Violet are dead ringers for the down-to-earth figures one would meet there. The novel’s twist occurs with the Austrian Anschluss when the director’s family is threatened by the Nazi takeover, which in turn puts the film in jeopardy. Isherwood’s novel is too discursive to really engage with the implications, but even so, the way the people working on the film react to an event in a distant country which will eventually have unimagined consequences in Britain feels disconcerting, the insularity contributing to a blasé lack of concern, something Isherwood is aware of. The novel was published in 1945 and one can imagine Isherwood working on it during the war, mindful of the way in which the events that lead up to the catastrophe were ignored; in the words of Auden: “How everyone turns away, quite leisurely from the disaster.”