The story of a German chanteuse and her rise to fame in Nazi Germany has as its backdrop fascism as lavish spectacle. Fassbinder: "Whenever anything happens in history, you'll find music. Hitler didn't put on these shows for nothing....Music is a means of spell-binding people." Hanna Schygulla stars as Willie, the cabaret singer turned mega-star and Fü;hrer's pet, who is in love with a Jewish conductor, Robert (Giancarlo Giannini), involved in the underground. Anyone familiar with the ubiquitous title song will appreciate its use as a torture device on poor Robert. "Try to imagine a bold mixture of von Sternberg and Dietrich doing a recreation rather than a foreshadowing of the Nazi era, with dabs of Vincente Minnelli, Douglas Sirk, and Blake Edwards thrown in from a modernist perspective....The simultaneous deification of an entertainer and the damnation of a nation is aided every step of the way by the subtle mythologizing of Schygulla, always the director's ace in the hole. (Lili Marleen) is a mixture of irony, egotism, self-consciousness, and 1940s movie-musical exuberance." (Andrew Sarris)