LILI MARLEEN
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Screenplay by Manfred Purzer, Joshua Sinclair and Rainer Werner Fassbinder
When she started, in Switzerland in the mid-1930s, she was Just a Gigolette, one of Seven Beauties singing in a Cabaret. Then Lale Andersen stumbled onto a discarded piece of Great War schmaltz, a soldier's love song called Lili Marleen. As German soldiers swarmed over the globe in 1939, they carried this song with them. Lale became a star—for a time, the darling of the Third Reich —and Lili Marleen the song of her life.
This is the movie version, and it cleaves as tenaciously to the...