Prater violet - Christopher Isherwood

'A deliberate historical parable.

Prater Violet resembles episodes in Goodbye to Berlin and keeps up the same high level of excellence' - Edmund Wilson An impatient phone call from the temperamental Austrian director, Friedrich Bergmann, introduces a young Christopher Isherwood to the film industry.

Isherwood's job is to rescue the script of an idiotic love story set in nineteenth-century Vienna, a film called Prater Violet.

In the real Vienna of 1934 the Austrian Right crushes a socialist uprising.

Bergmann is distraught and his prophecy of the coming war goes unheeded.

As tensions on set grow, studio intrigues and competing egos threaten to derail the whole project.