Word: lale
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...version, and it cleaves as tenaciously to the facts as any star biopic from Hollywood's heady days. Fassbinder built his reputation with films (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The Marriage of Maria Braun) that played high-voltage melodrama as deadpan farce; here he has turned Lale's tale into what Hanna Schygulla, who impersonates her in the film, calls "a Nazi fairy tale." As the new star gorges on her celebrity, making love to her mirror image in a palatial white bedroom, her countrymen starve to win the war and her country's enemies...