🌈📘🎥Friday's Film Adaptation🎥📘🌈: The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood

Summary:

A classic of 20th-century fiction, The Berlin Stories inspired the Broadway musical and Oscar-winning film Cabaret.

First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two astonishing related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which are recognized today as classics of modern fiction. Isherwood magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming, with its avenues and cafés; marvelously grotesque, with its nightlife and dreamers; dangerous, with its vice and intrigue; powerful and seedy, with its mobs and millionaires—this is the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power. The Berlin Stories is inhabited by a wealth of characters: the unforgettable Sally Bowles, whose misadventures in the demimonde were popularized on the American stage and screen by Julie Harris in I Am A Camera and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret; Mr. Norris, the improbable old debauchee mysteriously caught between the Nazis and the Communists; plump Fräulein Schroeder, who thinks an operation to reduce the scale of her Büste might relieve her heart palpitations; and the distinguished and doomed Jewish family, the Landauers.

A Berlin Diary

Autumn 1930

From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scroll-work and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and secondhand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

At eight o’clock in the evening the house-doors will be locked. The children are having supper. The shops are shut. The electric sign is switched on over the night-bell of the little hotel on the corner, where you can hire a room by the hour. And soon the whistling will begin. Young men are calling their girls. Standing down there in the cold, they whistle up at the lighted windows of warm rooms where the beds are already turned down for the night. They want to be let in. Their signals echo down the deep hollow street, lascivious and private and sad. Because of the whistling, I do not care to stay here in the evenings. It reminds me that I am in a foreign city, alone, far from home. Sometimes I determine not to listen to it, pick up a book, try to read. But soon a call is sure to sound, so piercing, so insistent, so despairingly human, that at last I have to get up and peep through the slats of the Venetian blind to make quite sure that it is not — as I know very well it could not possibly be — for me.

The extraordinary smell in this room when the stove is lighted and the window shut; not altogether unpleasant, a mixture of incense and stale buns. The tall tiled stove, gorgeously coloured, like an altar. The washstand like a Gothic shrine. The cupboard also is Gothic, with carved cathedral windows: Bismarck faces the King of Prussia in stained glass. My best chair would do for a bishop’s throne. In the corner, three sham medieval halberds (from a theatrical touring company?) are fastened together to form a hatstand. Frl. Schroeder unscrews the heads of the halberds and polishes them from time to time. They are heavy and sharp enough to kill.

Everything in the room is like that: unnecessarily solid, abnormally heavy and dangerously sharp. Here, at the writing-table, I am confronted by a phalanx of metal objects — a pair of candlesticks shaped like entwined serpents, an ashtray from which emerges the head of a crocodile, a paperknife copied from a Florentine dagger, a brass dolphin holding on the end of its tail a small broken clock. What becomes of such things? How could they ever be destroyed? They will probably remain intact for thousands of years: people will treasure them in museums. Or perhaps they will merely be melted down for munitions in a war. Every morning, Frl. Schroeder arranges them very carefully in certain unvarying positions: there they stand, like an uncompromising statement of her views on Capital and Society, Religion and Sex.

All day long she goes padding about the large dingy flat. Shapeless but alert, she waddles from room to room, in carpet slippers and a flowered dressing-gown pinned ingeniously together, so that not an inch of petticoat or bodice is to be seen, flicking with her duster, peeping, spying, poking her short pointed nose into the cupboards and luggage of her lodgers. She has dark, bright, inquisitive eyes and pretty waved brown hair of which she is proud. She must be about fifty-five years old.

Long ago, before the War and the Inflation, she used to be comparatively well off. She went to the Baltic for her summer holidays and kept a maid to do the housework. For the last thirty years she has lived here and taken in lodgers. She started doing it because she liked to have company.

“ ‘Lina,’ my friends used to say to me, ‘however can you? How can you bear to have strange people living in your rooms and spoiling your furniture, especially when you’ve got the money to be independent?’ And I’d always give them the same answer. ‘My lodgers aren’t lodgers,’ I used to say. ‘They’re my guests.’

“You see, Herr Issyvoo, in those days I could afford to be very particular about the sort of people who came to live here. I could pick and choose. I only took them really well connected and well educated — proper gentlefolk (like yourself, Herr Issyvoo). I had a Freiherr once, and a Rittmeister and a Professor. They often gave me presents — a bottle of cognac or a box of chocolates or some flowers. And when one of them went away for his holidays he’d always send me a card — from London, it might be, or Paris, or Baden-Baden. Ever such pretty cards I used to get . . .”

And now Frl. Schroeder has not even got a room of her own. She has to sleep in the living-room, behind a screen, on a small sofa with broken springs. As in so many of the older Berlin flats, our living-room connects the front part of the house with the back. The lodgers who live on the front have to pass through the living-room on their way to the bathroom, so that Frl. Schroeder is often disturbed during the night. “But I drop off again at once. It doesn’t worry me. I’m much too tired.” She has to do all the housework herself and it takes up most of her day. “Twenty years ago, if anybody had told me to scrub my own floors, I’d have slapped his face for him. But you get used to it. You can get used to anything. Why, I remember the time when I’d sooner cut off my right hand than empty this chamber. . . And now,” says Frl. Schroeder, suiting the action to the word, “my goodness! It’s no more to me than pouring out a cup of tea!”

She is fond of pointing out to me the various marks and stains left by lodgers who have inhabited this room:

“Yes, Herr Issyvoo, I’ve got something to remember each of them by . . . Look here, on the rug — I’ve sent it to the cleaners I don’t know how often but nothing will get it out — that’s where Herr Noeske was sick after his birthday party. What in the world can he have been eating, to make a mess like that? He’d come to Berlin to study, you know. His parents lived in Brandenburg — a first-class family; oh, I assure you! They had pots of money! His Herr Papa was a surgeon, and of course he wanted his boy to follow in his footsteps . . . What a charming young man! ‘Herr Noeske,’ I used to say to him, ‘excuse me, but you must really work harder — you with all your brains! Think of your Herr Papa and your Frau Mama; it isn’t fair to them to waste their good money like that. Why, if you were to drop it in the Spree it would be better. At least it would make a splash!’ I was like a mother to him. And always, when he’d got himself into some scrape — he was terribly thoughtless — he’d come straight to me: ‘Schroederschen,’ he used to say, ‘please don’t be angry with me . . . We were playing cards last night and I lost the whole of this month’s allowance. I daren’t tell Father . . .’ And then he’d look at me with those great big eyes of his. I knew exactly what he was after, the scamp! But I hadn’t the heart to refuse. So I’d sit down and write a letter to his Frau Mama and beg her to forgive him just that once and send some more money. And she always would . . . Of course, as a woman, I knew how to appeal to a mother’s feelings, although I’ve never had any children of my own . . . What are you smiling at, Herr Issyvoo? Well, well! Mistakes will happen, you know!

A Kit Kat Klub entertainer in Weimar Republic era Berlin romances two men while the Nazi Party rises to power around them.

Release Date: February 13, 1972

Release Time: 124 minutes

Director: Bob Fosse

Cast:

Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles

Michael York as Brian Roberts

Helmut Griem as Baron Maximilian von Heune

Joel Grey as the master of ceremonies

Fritz Wepper as Fritz Wendel

Marisa Berenson as Natalia Landauer

Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel as Fräulein Schneider

Helen Vita as Fräulein Kost

Sigrid von Richthofen as Fräulein Mayr

Gerd Vespermann as Bobby

Ralf Wolter as Herr Ludwig

Ricky Renée as Elke

Estrongo Nachama as the cantor

Kathryn Doby, Inge Jaeger, Angelika Koch, Helen Velkovorska, Gitta Schmidt and Louise Quick as the Kit Kat Klub dancers

Oliver Collignon as the Hitler Youth singer (uncredited)

Mark Lambert as the singing voice of the Hitler Youth singer (uncredited)

Pierre Franckh as a Nazi (uncredited)

Awards:

45th Academy Awards - March 27, 1973

Best Picture - Cy Feuer - Nominated

Best Director - Bob Fosse - Won

Best Actress - Liza Minnelli - Won

Best Supporting Actor - Joel Grey - Won

Best Screenplay – Based on Material from Another Medium - Jay Presson Allen - Nominated

Best Art Direction - Won

     Art Direction - Hans Jürgen Kiebach and Rolf Zehetbauer;

     Set Decoration - Herbert Strabel

Best Cinematography - Geoffrey Unsworth - Won

Best Film Editing - David Bretherton - Won

Best Scoring: Adaptation and Original Song Score - Ralph Burns - Won

Best Sound - Robert Knudson and David Hildyard - Won

26th BAFTAs - February 28, 1973

Best Film - Won

Best Direction - Bob Fosse - Won

Best Actress in a Leading Role - Liza Minnelli - Won

Best Actress in a Supporting Role - Marisa Berenson - Nominated

Best Screenplay - Jay Presson Allen - Nominated

Best Art Direction - Rolf Zehetbauer - Won

Best Cinematography - Geoffrey Unsworth - Won

Best Costume Design - Charlotte Flemming - Nominated

Best Film Editing - David Bretherton - Nominated

Best Soundtrack - David Hildyard, Robert Knudson, and Arthur Piantadosi - Won

Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles - Joel Grey - Won

30th Golden Globes -January 28, 1973

Best Motion Picture–Musical or Comedy - Won

Best Actress in a Motion Picture–Musical or Comedy - Liza Minnelli - Won

Best Supporting Actor–Motion Picture - Joel Grey - Won

Best Supporting Actress–Motion Picture - Marisa Berenson - Nominated

Most Promising Newcomer–Female - Nominated

Best Director–Motion Picture - Bob Fosse - Nominated

Best Screenplay–Motion Picture - Jay Presson Allen - Nominated

Best Original Song–Motion Picture - "Mein Herr"

     Music by John Kander & Lyrics by Fred Ebb - Nominated

Best Original Song–Motion Picture - "Money, Money"

     Music by John Kander  Lyrics by Fred Ebb - Nominated

AFIs 100 Years . . .

100 Songs - Cabaret - No. 18

Greatest Movie Musicals - No. 5

100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) - No. 63

Christopher Isherwood
Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was one of the most prominent writers of his generation. He is the author of many works of fiction, including All the Conspirators, The Memorial, Mr. Norris Changes Trains, and Goodbye to Berlin, on which the musical Cabaret was based, as well as works of nonfiction and biography.

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👀Omnibus containing I am the Camera & Goodbye to Berlin(book movie is based on)👀

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🌈📘🎥Friday's Film Adaptation🎥📘🌈: Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood

Summary:

An indispensable memoir by one of the most prominent writers of his generation

Originally published in 1976, Christopher and His Kind covers the most memorable ten years in the writer's life—from 1928, when Christopher Isherwood left England to spend a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to 1939, when he arrived in America. His friends and colleagues during this time included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and E. M. Forster, as well as colorful figures he met in Germany and later fictionalized in his two Berlin novels—and who appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret.

What most impressed the first readers of this memoir, however, was the candor with which he describes his life in gay Berlin of the 1930s and his struggles to save his companion, a German man named Heinz, from the Nazis. An engrossing and dramatic story and a fascinating glimpse into a little-known world, Christopher and His Kind remains one of Isherwood's greatest achievements.

CHAPTER 1

There is a book called Lions and Shadows, published in 1938, which describes Christopher Isherwood's life between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four. It is not truly autobiographical, however. The author conceals important facts about himself. He overdramatizes many episodes and gives his characters fictitious names. In a foreword, he suggests that Lions and Shadows should be read as if it were a novel.

The book I am now going to write will be as frank and factual as I can make it, especially as far as I myself am concerned. It will therefore be a different kind of book from Lions and Shadows and not, strictly speaking, a sequel to it. However, I shall begin at the point where the earlier book ends: twenty-four-year-old Christopher's departure from England on March 14, 1929, to visit Berlin for the first time in his life.

Christopher had been urged to come to Berlin by his friend and former schoolmate Wystan Hugh Auden — who is called Hugh Weston in Lions and Shadows. Wystan, then aged twenty-two, had been on a study holiday in Germany since taking his degree at Oxford.

While in Berlin, Wystan had met the anthropologist John Layard — Barnard in Lions and Shadows. Layard had once been a patient and pupil of Homer Lane, the American psychologist. He had introduced Wystan to Lane's revolutionary teachings, thus inspiring him to use them as a frame of reference for his poems. Wystan had now begun to write lines which are like the slogans of a psychiatric dictator about to seize control of the human race: "Publish each healer ... It is time for the destruction of error ... Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response ... Harrow the house of the dead ... The game is up for you and for the others ... Love ... needs death ... death of the old gang ... New styles of architecture, a change of heart."

According to Lane-Layard:

There is only one sin: disobedience to the inner law of our own nature. This disobedience is the fault of those who teach us, as children, to control God (our desires) instead of giving Him room to grow. The whole problem is to find out which is God and which is the Devil. And the one sure guide is that God appears always unreasonable, while the Devil appears always to be noble and right. God appears unreasonable because He has been put in prison and driven wild. The Devil is conscious control, and is, therefore, reasonable and sane.

Life-shaking words! When Christopher heard them, he was even more excited than Wystan had been, for they justified a change in his own life which he had been longing but not quite daring to make. Now he burned to put them into practice, to unchain his desires and hurl reason and sanity into prison.

However, when Lions and Shadows suggests that Christopher's chief motive for going to Berlin was that he wanted to meet Layard, it is avoiding the truth. He did look forward to meeting Layard, but that wasn't why he was in such a hurry to make this journey. It was Berlin itself he was hungry to meet; the Berlin Wystan had promised him. To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.

At school, Christopher had fallen in love with many boys and been yearningly romantic about them. At college he had at last managed to get into bed with one. This was due entirely to the initiative of his partner, who, when Christopher became scared and started to raise objections, locked the door, and sat down firmly on Christopher's lap. I am still grateful to him. I hope he is alive and may happen to read these lines.

Other experiences followed, all of them enjoyable but none entirely satisfying. This was because Christopher was suffering from an inhibition, then not unusual among upper-class homosexuals; he couldn't relax sexually with a member of his own class or nation. He needed a working-class foreigner. He had become clearly aware of this when he went to Germany in May 1928, to stay with an elderly cousin who was the British consul at Bremen. He had no love adventures while there, but he looked around him and saw what he was missing. The Bremen trip isn't even mentioned in Lions and Shadows because Christopher was then unwilling to discuss its sexual significance. It is described in a novel written many years later, Down There on a Visit, but with too much fiction and too little frankness.

* * *

Christopher's first visit to Berlin was short — a week or ten days — but that was sufficient; I now recognize it as one of the decisive events of my life. I can still make myself faintly feel the delicious nausea of initiation terror which Christopher felt as Wystan pushed back the heavy leather door curtain of a boy bar called the Cosy Corner and led the way inside. In the autumn of 1928, Christopher had felt a different kind of nauseated excitement, equally strong and memorable, when, as a medical student, he had entered an operating theater in St. Thomas's Hospital to watch his first surgical operation. But the door of the operating theater, unlike that of the Cosy Corner, led him nowhere. Within six months, he had given up medicine altogether.

At the Cosy Corner, Christopher met a youth whom I shall call Bubi (Baby). That was his nickname among his friends, because he had a pretty face, appealing blue eyes, golden blond hair, and a body which was smooth-skinned and almost hairless, although hard and muscular. On seeing Bubi, Christopher experienced instant infatuation. This wasn't surprising; to be infatuated was what he had come to Berlin for. Bubi was the first presentable candidate who appeared to claim the leading role in Christopher's love myth.

What was this role? Most importantly, Bubi had to be the German Boy, the representative of his race. (Bubi was actually Czech, but that could be overlooked since German was the only language he spoke.) By embracing Bubi, Christopher could hold in his arms the whole mystery-magic of foreignness, Germanness. By means of Bubi, he could fall in love with and possess the entire nation.

That Bubi was a blond was also very important — and not merely because blondness is a characteristic feature of the German Boy. The Blond — no matter of what nationality — had been a magical figure for Christopher from his childhood and would continue to be so for many years. And yet I find it hard to say why ... John Layard would have encouraged me to invent an explanation, never mind how absurd it sounded. He would have said that anything one invents about oneself is part of one's personal myth and therefore true. So here is the first explanation which occurs to me: Christopher chose to identify himself with a black-haired British ancestor and to see the Blond as the invader who comes from another land to conquer and rape him. Thus the Blond becomes the masculine foreign yang mating with Christopher's feminine native yin ... This makes a kind of Jungian sense — but I can't by any stretch of the imagination apply it to the relations between Bubi and Christopher. Bubi had been, among other things, a boxer, so he must have been capable of aggression. But with Christopher he was gentle, considerate, almost too polite.

In addition to being able to play the German Boy and the Blond, Bubi had a role which he had created for himself; he was the Wanderer, the Lost Boy, homeless, penniless, dreamily passive yet tough, careless of danger, indifferent to hardship, roaming the earth. This was how Bubi saw himself and how he made Christopher and many others see him. Bubi's vulnerability, combined with his tough independence, was powerfully attractive and at the same time teasing. You longed to protect him, but he didn't need you. Or did he? You longed to help him, but he wouldn't accept help. Or would he? Wystan wasn't at all impressed by Bubi's performance as the Wanderer. Yet, largely to please Christopher, he wrote a beautiful poem about Bubi, "This Loved One."

Throughout Christopher's stay in Berlin, Bubi spent a few hours with him every day. For Christopher, this was a period of ecstasy, sentimentality, worry, hope, and clock-watching, every instant of it essentially painful. Christopher wanted to keep Bubi all to himself forever, to possess him utterly, and he knew that this was impossible and absurd. If he had been a savage, he might have solved the problem by eating Bubi — for magical, not gastronomic, reasons. As for Bubi himself, he was the most obliging of companions; but there was nothing he could do, in bed or out of it, to make Christopher feel any more secure.

They went shopping together and bought Bubi small presents, mostly shirts, socks, and ties; he refused to let Christopher be extravagant. They ate wiener schnitzels and whipped-cream desserts at restaurants. They went to the zoo, rode the roller coaster at Luna Park, and swam in the Wellenbad, a huge indoor pool which had a mechanism for making waves. At the movies, they saw Pudovkin's Storm over Asia and Pabst's Wedekind film, Pandora's Box.

The latter was highly educational entertainment for Christopher, as Wystan unkindly pointed out, since it shows the appalling consequences of trying to own someone who is naturally promiscuous. Christopher did indeed start to make a scene when Bubi broke a date with him. After being coached by Wystan, he painstakingly repeated a short speech which began: "Ich bin eifersuechtig" (I am jealous). Bubi listened patiently. Perhaps he even sympathized with Christopher's feelings; for he himself, as Wystan found out later, had a weakness for whores and would pursue them desperately, giving them all the money he had. He then answered at some length, laying his hand on Christopher's arm and speaking in a soothing tone. But Christopher's German was still scanty and he couldn't understand whatever lies Bubi was telling him.

All was soon forgiven, of course. When Christopher left for London, Bubi pulled a cheap gold-plated chain bracelet out of his pocket — probably an unwanted gift from some admirer — and fastened it around Christopher's wrist. This delighted Christopher, not only as a love token but also as a badge of his liberation; he still regarded the wearing of jewelry by men as a daring act, and this would be a constant reminder to him that he was now one of the free. When he got home, he displayed the bracelet challengingly. But his mother, Kathleen, wasn't shocked, only vaguely puzzled that he should care to wear anything so common.

Despite his preoccupation with Bubi, Christopher had found the time to see John Layard in Berlin. Under any other circumstances, he would have been fascinated by Layard's X-ray eyes, his mocking amusement, his stunning frankness, and his talk about Lane. But Layard's theory had seemed academic, just then, compared with Bubi's practice.

However, the next year, during a visit to England, Christopher met Layard again. They became friends and Layard taught him a great deal. He even cured Christopher — or, rather, made him cure himself — of an intimate physical shame. Christopher had been ashamed of the patch of hair which had sprouted out of an old acne scar on his left shoulder blade. Layard explained that this was a conflict between instinct — the hairy left shoulder — and conscious control — the hairless right one. God and the Devil were at it again. "You see, your instinct's trying to get your animal nature out of jail, trying to force you to recognize it. So it's growing fur! I like it, it's beautiful!" And Layard actually kissed the hairy shoulder, to show he meant what he said. Christopher giggled with embarrassment. But gradually, from that day on, he stopped being conscious of the hair, even when he had his shirt off in public.

* * *

Soon after getting back from Berlin, Christopher had a more than usually severe attack of tonsillitis. In those days, he was subject to sore throats. Wystan called them "the liar's quinsy" and reminded him that Lane had said they are symptoms of a basic untruthfulness in one's life. Christopher was quite willing to admit that his life in England was basically untruthful, since it conformed outwardly to standards of respectability which he inwardly rejected and despised. But Lane had also said, "Every disease is a cure, if we know how to take it," and Christopher was now sure that he knew how to make his life truthful again. He studied German hard — from Hugo's German in Three Months without a Master. He wrote letters in German to Bubi, which Bubi answered with tactful requests for money. And, as soon as he could afford the trip, he went back to Germany. This was in early July.

Wystan was now at a village called Rothehuette in the Harz Mountains, surrounded by forests. The air smelled of resin and echoed romantically with jangling cowbells. At the end of the day, when the cows came down from the high pastures into the village, they would separate from the herd of their own accord and find their ways to their respective farms. It was easy to pretend to yourself that they were human beings bewitched, for the whole place could have been a setting for one of Grimm's fairy tales, except that it had a railway station.

Wystan was staying at the inn with a cheerful, good-natured youth he had brought with him from Berlin. He had already made himself completely at home. His room was like every other room he had ever lived in, a chaos of books and manuscripts; he was reading and writing with his usual impatient energy. He welcomed Christopher as one welcomes a guest to one's household; he had the air of owning the village and the villagers. Certainly he must have been the chief topic of their conversation. He entertained them by thumping out German popular songs and English hymn tunes on a piano in the refreshment room of the railway station and intrigued them by wrestling naked with his friend in a nearby meadow.

At Christopher's request, Wystan had phoned Bubi in Berlin and told him to come and join them the day after Christopher arrived. But two days passed and he didn't appear. Christopher became frantic. He decided to go to Berlin and look for Bubi. To help Christopher in his search, Wystan gave him the address of an Englishman he knew there, named Francis. And Francis did help, by coming with him to the Cosy Corner and other bars and translating when he questioned boys who knew Bubi. Thus Christopher found out that Bubi was wanted by the police and that he had disappeared.

So Christopher returned mournfully to Rothehuette. And, the next day, the police arrived. They must have been tipped off by somebody in one of the Berlin bars that Bubi might be expected to join Christopher at this mountain hideout. While the police were questioning him and Wystan, a letter was handed to Christopher by the innkeeper. It had a Dutch stamp on it. It was from Bubi. Christopher read it under their very noses. Bubi wrote that he was in Amsterdam and about to ship out as a deck hand on a boat to South America. Could Christopher send him some money as quickly as possible, poste restante? Bubi added that he wasn't giving the address where he was staying because he was in Holland illegally and this letter might fall into the wrong hands. As for the money, Bubi had sworn to himself never to ask for any more, because Christopher had been so generous already. But now here he was, amongst strangers, all alone. There was no one he could trust in the whole world. Except Christopher, his last dear true friend ... The letter thrilled Christopher unspeakably. As he read, he began to feel that he himself had become an honorary member of the criminal class. Now he must be worthy of the occasion. He must respond recklessly. He must leave for Amsterdam at once and see Bubi before he sailed.

Meanwhile, the police, not wanting to go away empty-handed, were checking up on Wystan's friend. They asked for his identity papers — and, alas, his papers were not in order. (Boys would say, "My papers aren't in order," and "My stomach isn't in order," in the same plaintive tone, as though both were ailments.) The police soon made him admit that he was a fugitive from a reform school. Then they took him off with them.

In the 1930s, rising literary star Christopher Isherwood flees uptight England for the decadent gay lifestyle offered in Berlin. Once there, Isherwood falls for street sweeper named Heinz who he tries to save from the Nazis.

Release Date: March 19, 2011(BBC TV)

Release Time: 90 minutes

Director: Geoffrey Sax

Cast:

Matt Smith as Christopher Isherwood

Douglas Booth as Heinz Neddermeyer

Imogen Poots as Jean Ross

Pip Carter as W. H. Auden

Toby Jones as Gerald Hamilton

Alexander Dreymon as Caspar

Tom Wlaschiha as Gerhardt Neddermeyer

Issy Van Randwyck as Fräulein Thurau

Gertrude Thoma as Lili Neddermayer

Lindsay Duncan as Kathleen Isherwood

Perry Millward as Richard Isherwood

Iddo Goldberg as Wilfrid Landauer

Will Kemp as Bobby Gilbert

Stuart Graham as Passport officer

Trailer

Clip

Author Bio:
Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was one of the most prominent writers of his generation. He is the author of many works of fiction, including All the Conspirators, The Memorial, Mr. Norris Changes Trains, and Goodbye to Berlin, on which the musical Cabaret was based, as well as works of nonfiction and biography.

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📘🎥Friday's Film Adaptation🎥📘: A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

Summary:
Welcome to sunny suburban 1960s Southern California. George is a gay middle-aged English professor, adjusting to solitude after the tragic death of his young partner. He is determined to persist in the routines of his former life. A Single Man follows him over the course of an ordinary twenty-four hours. Behind his British reserve, tides of grief, rage, and loneliness surge—but what is revealed is a man who loves being alive despite all the everyday injustices.

When Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man first appeared, it shocked many with its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in maturity. Isherwood's favorite of his own novels, it now stands as a classic lyric meditation on life as an outsider.

Chapter One
Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and there from deduced I am, I am now. Here comes next, and is at least negatively reassuring; because here, this morning, is where it has expected to find itself: what's called at home.

But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until — later or sooner — perhaps — no, not perhaps — quite certainly: it will come.

Fear tweaks the vagus nerve. A sickish shrinking from what waits, somewhere out there, dead ahead.

But meanwhile the cortex, that grim disciplinarian, has taken its place at the central controls and has been testing them, one after another: the legs stretch, the lower back is arched, the fingers clench and relax. And now, over the entire intercommunication system, is issued the first general order of the day: UP.

Obediently the body levers itself out of bed — wincing from twinges in the arthritic thumbs and the left knee, mildly nauseated by the pylorus in a state of spasm — and shambles naked into the bathroom, where its bladder is emptied and it is weighed: still a bit over 150 pounds, in spite of all that toiling at the gym! Then to the mirror.

What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament. Here's what it has done to itself, here's the mess it has somehow managed to get itself into during its fifty-eight years; expressed in terms of a dull, harassed stare, a coarsened nose, a mouth dragged down by the corners into a grimace as if at the sourness of its own toxins, cheeks sagging from their anchors of muscle, a throat hanging limp in tiny wrinkled folds. The harassed look is that of a desperately tired swimmer or runner; yet there is no question of stopping. The creature we are watching will struggle on and on until it drops. Not because it is heroic. It can imagine no alternative.

Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face — the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man — all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us — we have died — what is there to be afraid of?

It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed.

It stares and stares. Its lips part. It starts to breathe through its mouth. Until the cortex orders it impatiently to wash, to shave, to brush its hair. Its nakedness has to be covered. It must be dressed up in clothes because it is going outside, into the world of the other people; and these others must be able to identify it. Its behavior must be acceptable to them.

Obediently, it washes, shaves, brushes its hair, for it accepts its responsibilities to the others. It is even glad that it has its place among them. It knows what is expected of it.

It knows its name. It is called George.


By the time it has gotten dressed, it has become he; has become already more or less George — though still not the whole George they demand and are prepared to recognize. Those who call him on the phone at this hour of the morning would be bewildered, maybe even scared, if they could realize what this three-quarters-human thing is that they are talking to. But, of course, they never could — its voice's mimicry of their George is nearly perfect. Even Charlotte is taken in by it. Only two or three times has she sensed something uncanny and asked, "Geo — are you all right?"

He crosses the front room, which he calls his study, and comes down the staircase. The stairs turn a corner; they are narrow and steep. You can touch both handrails with your elbows, and you have to bend your head, even if, like George, you are only five eight. This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely.

Nevertheless ...

Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each other's bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in love — think what deep though invisible tracks they must leave, everywhere, behind them! The doorway into the kitchen has been built too narrow. Two people in a hurry, with plates of food in their hands, are apt to keep colliding here. And it is here, nearly every morning, that George, having reached the bottom of the stairs, has this sensation of suddenly finding himself on an abrupt, brutally broken off, jagged edge — as though the track had disappeared down a landslide. It is here that he stops short and knows, with a sick newness, almost as though it were for the first time: Jim is dead. Is dead.

He stands quite still, silent, or at most uttering a brief animal grunt, as he waits for the spasm to pass. Then he walks into the kitchen. These morning spasms are too painful to be treated sentimentally. After them, he feels relief, merely. It is like getting over a bad attack of cramp.


Today, there are more ants, winding in column across the floor, climbing up over the sink and threatening the closet where he keeps the jams and the honey. Doggedly he destroys them with a Flit gun and has a sudden glimpse of himself doing this: an obstinate, malevolent old thing imposing his will upon these instructive and admirable insects. Life destroying life before an audience of objects — pots and pans, knives and forks, cans and bottles — that have no part in the kingdom of evolution. Why? Why? Is it some cosmic enemy, some arch-tyrant who tries to blind us to his very existence by setting us against our natural allies, the fellow victims of his tyranny? But, alas, by the time George has thought all this, the ants are already dead and mopped up on a wet cloth and rinsed down the sink.

He fixes himself a plate of poached eggs, with bacon and toast and coffee, and sits down to eat them at the kitchen table. And meanwhile, around and around in his head goes the nursery jingle his nanny taught him when he was a child in England, all those years ago:

Poached eggs on toast are very nice —


(He sees her so plainly still, gray-haired with mouse-bright eyes, a plump little body carrying in the nursery breakfast tray, short of breath from climbing all those stairs. She used to grumble at their steepness and call them "The Wooden Mountains" — one of the magic phrases of his childhood.)

Poached eggs on toast are very nice,
If you try them once you'll want them twice!


Ah, the heartbreakingly insecure snugness of those nursery pleasures! Master George enjoying his eggs; Nanny watching him and smiling reassurance that all is safe in their dear tiny doomed world!


Breakfast with Jim used to be one of the best times of their day. It was then, while they were drinking their second and third cups of coffee, that they had their best talks. They talked about everything that came into their heads — including death, of course, and is there survival, and, if so, what exactly is it that survives. They even discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of getting killed instantly and of knowing you're about to die. But now George can't for the life of him remember what Jim's views were on this. Such questions are hard to take seriously. They seem so academic.

Just suppose that the dead do revisit the living. That something approximately to be described as Jim can return to see how George is making out. Would this be at all satisfactory? Would it even be worth while? At best, surely, it would be like the brief visit of an observer from another country who is permitted to peep in for a moment from the vast outdoors of his freedom and see, at a distance, through glass, this figure who sits solitary at the small table in the narrow room, eating his poached eggs humbly and dully, a prisoner for life.


The living room is dark and low-ceilinged, with bookshelves all along the wall opposite the windows. These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, according to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly — despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public — to put him to sleep, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.

He takes one of them down now, and Ruskin says to him:

... you liked pop-guns when you were schoolboys, and rifles and Armstrongs are only the same things better made: but then the worst of it is, that what was play to you when boys, was not play to the sparrows; and what is play to you now, is not play to the small birds of State neither; and for the black eagles, you are somewhat shy of taking shots at them, if I mistake not.

Intolerable old Ruskin, always absolutely in the right, and crazy, and so cross, with his whiskers, scolding the English — he is today's perfect companion for five minutes on the toilet. George feels a bowel movement coming on with agreeable urgency and climbs the stairs briskly to the bathroom, book in hand.


Sitting on the john, he can look out of the window. (They can see his head and shoulders from across the street, but not what he is doing.) It is a gray lukewarm California winter morning; the sky is low and soft with Pacific fog. Down at the shore, ocean and sky will be one soft, sad gray. The palms stand unstirred and the oleander bushes drip moisture from their leaves.

This street is called Camphor Tree Lane. Maybe camphor trees grew here once; there are none now. More probably the name was chosen for its picturesqueness by the pioneer escapists from dingy downtown Los Angeles and stuffy-snobbish Pasadena who came out here and founded this colony back in the early twenties. They referred to their stucco bungalows and clapboard shacks as cottages, giving them cute names like "The Fo'c'sle" and "Hi Nuff." They called their streets lanes, ways or trails, to go with the woodsy atmosphere they wanted to create. Their utopian dream was of a subtropical English village with Montmartre manners: a Little Good Place where you could paint a bit, write a bit, and drink lots. They saw themselves as rear-guard individualists, making a last-ditch stand against the twentieth century. They gave thanks loudly from morn till eve that they had escaped the soul-destroying commercialism of the city. They were tacky and cheerful and defiantly bohemian, tirelessly inquisitive about each other's doings, and boundlessly tolerant. When they fought, at least it was with fists and bottles and furniture, not lawyers. Most of them were lucky enough to have died off before the Great Change.

The Change began in the late forties, when the World War Two vets came swarming out of the East with their just-married wives, in search of new and better breeding grounds in the sunny Southland, which had been their last nostalgic glimpse of home before they shipped out to the Pacific. And what better breeding ground than a hillside neighborhood like this one, only five minutes' walk from the beach and with no through traffic to decimate the future tots? So, one by one, the cottages which used to reek of bathtub gin and reverberate with the poetry of Hart Crane have fallen to the occupying army of Coke-drinking television watchers.

The vets themselves, no doubt, would have adjusted pretty well to the original bohemian utopia; maybe some of them would even have taken to painting or writing between hangovers. But their wives explained to them, right from the start and in the very clearest language, that breeding and bohemianism do not mix. For breeding you need a steady job, you need a mortgage, you need credit, you need insurance. And don't you dare die, either, until the family's future is provided for.

So the tots appeared, litter after litter after litter. And the small old schoolhouse became a group of big new airy buildings. And the shabby market on the ocean front was enlarged into a super. And on Camphor Tree Lane two signs were posted. One of them told you not to eat the watercress which grew along the bed of the creek, because the water was polluted. (The original colonists had been eating it for years; and George and Jim tried some and it tasted delicious and nothing happened.) The other sign — those sinister black silhouettes on a yellow ground — said CHILDREN AT PLAY.


George and Jim saw the yellow sign, of course, the first time they came down here, house-hunting. But they ignored it, for they had already fallen in love with the house. They loved it because you could only get to it by the bridge across the creek; the surrounding trees and the steep bushy cliff behind shut it in like a house in a forest clearing. "As good as being on our own island," George said. They waded ankle-deep in dead leaves from the sycamore (a chronic nuisance); determined, now, to like everything. Peering into the low damp dark living room, they agreed how cozy it would be at night with a fire. The garage was covered with a vast humped growth of ivy, half dead, half alive, which made it twice as big as itself; inside it was tiny, having been built in the days of the model T Ford. Jim thought it would be useful for keeping some of the animals in. Their cars were both too big for it, anyway, but they could be parked on the bridge. The bridge was beginning to sag a little, they noticed. "Oh well, I expect it'll last our time," said Jim.


No doubt the neighborhood children see the house very much as George and Jim saw it that first afternoon. Shaggy with ivy and dark and secret-looking, it is just the lair you'd choose for a mean old storybook monster. This is the role George has found himself playing, with increasing violence, since he started to live alone. It releases a part of his nature which he hated to let Jim see. What would Jim say if he could see George waving his arms and roaring like a madman from the window, as Mrs. Strunk's Benny and Mrs. Garfein's Joe dash back and forth across the bridge on a dare? (Jim always got along with them so easily. He would let them pet the skunks and the raccoon and talk to the myna bird; and yet they never crossed the bridge without being invited.)

Mrs. Strunk, who lives opposite, dutifully scolds her children from time to time, telling them to leave him alone, explaining that he's a professor and has to work so hard. But Mrs. Strunk, sweet-natured though she is — grown wearily gentle from toiling around the house at her chores, gently melancholy from regretting her singing days on radio; all given up in order to bear Mr. Strunk five boys and two girls — even she can't refrain from telling George, with a smile of motherly indulgence and just the faintest hint of approval, that Benny (her youngest) now refers to him as "That Man," since George ran Benny clear out of the yard, across the bridge and down the street; he had been beating on the door of the house with a hammer.

George is ashamed of his roarings because they aren't playacting. He does genuinely lose his temper and feels humiliated and sick to his stomach later. At the same time, he is quite well aware that the children want him to behave in this way. They are actually willing him to do it. If he should suddenly refuse to play the monster, and they could no longer provoke him, they would have to look around for a substitute. The question Is this playacting or does he really hate us? never occurs to them. They are utterly indifferent to him except as a character in their myths. It is only George who cares. Therefore he is all the more ashamed of his moment of weakness about a month ago, when he bought some candy and offered it to a bunch of them on the street. They took it without thanks, looking at him curiously and uneasily; learning from him maybe at that moment their first lesson in contempt.


Meanwhile, Ruskin has completely lost his wig. "Taste is the ONLY morality!" he yells, wagging his finger at George. He is getting tiresome, so George cuts him off in midsentence by closing the book. Still sitting on the john, George looks out of the window.

The morning is quiet. Nearly all the kids are in school; the Christmas vacation is still a couple of weeks away. (At the thought of Christmas, George feels a chill of desperation. Maybe he'll do something drastic, take a plane to Mexico City and be drunk for a week and run wild around the bars. You won't, and you never will, a voice says, coldly bored with him.)

Ah, here's Benny, hammer in hand. He hunts among the trash cans set out ready for collection on the sidewalk and drags out a broken bathroom scale. As George watches, Benny begins smashing it with his hammer, uttering cries as he does so; he is making believe that the machine is screaming with pain. And to think that Mrs. Strunk, the proud mother of this creature, used to ask Jim, with shudders of disgust, how he could bear to touch those harmless baby king snakes!

An English professor, one year after the sudden death of his boyfriend, is unable to cope with his typical days in 1960s Los Angeles.

Release Date: December 11, 2009
Release Time: 100 minutes

Cast:
Colin Firth as George Falconer
Julianne Moore as Charlotte (Charley)
Nicholas Hoult as Kenny Potter
Matthew Goode as Jim
Jon Kortajarena as Carlos
Paulette Lamori as Alva
Ryan Simpkins as Jennifer Strunk
Ginnifer Goodwin as Mrs. Strunk
Teddy Sears as Mr. Strunk
Paul Butler as Christopher Strunk
Aaron Sanders as Tom Strunk
Lee Pace as Grant Lefanu
Erin Daniels as Bank Teller
Aline Weber as Lois

Awards:
Academy Awards
Best Actor - Colin Firth - Nominated

BAFTAs
Best Leading Actor - Colin Firth - Won
Best Costume Design - Arianne Phillips - Nominated

Golden Globe Awards
Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture-Drama - Colin Firth - Nominated
Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture - Julianne Moore - Nominated
Best Original Score-Motion Picture - Abel Korzeniowski - Nominated

Screen Actors Guild Awards
Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role - Colin Firth -Nominated

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Author Bio:
Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was one of the most prominent writers of his generation. He is the author of many works of fiction, including All the Conspirators, The Memorial, Mr. Norris Changes Trains, and Goodbye to Berlin, on which the musical Cabaret was based, as well as works of nonfiction and biography.

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