FILM: SWEETHEART OF THE THIRD REICH

By Vincent Canby
Published: July 10, 1981

NOT surprisingly, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's ''Lili Marleen,'' the new film by West Germany's most talented and prolific director, is made up of contradictions, but what is new for a Fassbinder work is that the film is far more entertaining to watch than it is interesting to speculate about. That means it's a disappointment.


''Lili Marleen,'' which takes its title from the German World War II song that became almost as popular among Allied troops as among the Germans, purports to tell the story of the song and of the second-rate cabaret performer, a young singer named Willie (Hanna Schygulla), who rose to fame in Nazi Germany by her total identification with that one number. The story, which I assume is fiction, is a Fassbinderian mixture of tribute, especially to the ornate Hollywood films of Douglas Sirk (''Written on the Wind,'' ''Imitation of Life,'' among others) and of parody of those films. It's witty but never really funny.

The film starts in 1938, in Zurich, where Willie, a German national, is singing and dancing (with very heavy feet) in a small local club and, more importantly, having the affair of her life with Robert Mendelsson (Giancarlo Giannini), a nightclub pianist with aspirations to make it in the world of ''serious'' music. Unknown at first to Willie is the fact that Robert's father (Mel Ferrer), a rich Swiss businessman, is the head of a secret organization that spirits Jews out of Germany and that Robert is his chief operative. Old man Mendelsson, fearing that Willie might blow his cover, arranges that Willie be refused re-entrance into Switzerland after a brief trip to Germany with Robert.

Left to her own devices in Nazi Germany, the apolitical Willie, through one connection and another, finds fame and, briefly, fortune in Berlin, where her career is promoted by a high-ranking Nazi. When her protector first hears her singing ''Lili Marleen,'' he cries in the best tradition of old Fox movies about show-biz: ''The song's got something that moves people! Let's cut a record!''

She does, and the rest, as they say, is history, but it's history as filtered through pop movies. Goebbels hates the song - he thinks it's too downbeat for wartime, but Hitler is enchanted by it and by Willie and sees to it that she's set up in a luxuriously awful whiteon-white apartment.

Despite her position as the sweetheart of all the Fatherland, Willie still dreams of the piano-playing Robert and when, by chance, he reappears in wartime Germany, she offers herself to him and to his cause. According to ''Lili Marleen,'' the movie, it's Willie who was instrumental in smuggling the first pictures out of Germany that would confirm the existence of the plan for the Final Solution.

''Lili Marleen,'' which opens today at the Cinema 1, is a very odd movie. It's full of the kind of grand, hypnotic camera movements favored by Mr. Sirk - slow, elegant pan-shots, scenes photographed through panes of glass or into mirrors. It's addicted to the sorts of corny montages that, for example, chronicle the rise to popularity of the recording of ''Lili Marleen'' by showing us German soldiers solemnly listening to the song in the trenches, in U-boats and in the African desert.

At the same time Mr. Fassbinder seems to be sending up the movie and everybody in it. Though the story is wildly melodramatic and sentimental, the film itself is as cold as death, which is certainly this brilliant director's perverse intention.

Miss Schygulla is charming as the none-too-talented Willie, who is remarkably brave and loyal and whose final act of renunciation is common enough in Hollywood movies that are done straight. In a movie as movie-conscious as ''Lili Marleen'' it's a joke, an act of moviemaking cruelty.

Mr. Giannini is a good deal less comfortable as a German-Swiss Jew who, in one of those sudden reversals of fortune possible only in movies, has become a successful symphony conductor by the time the movie ends.

Mr. Ferrer plays with a properly deadpan face throughout, while a number of familiar members of Mr. Fassbinder's stock company (including Hark Bohm, Udo Kier, Lilo Pempeit, Irma Herman and Mr. Fassbinder himself) turn up in tiny roles.

''Lili Marleen'' is a bewildering experience. I'm not sure whether Mr. Fassbinder, having been handed a bundle of money to make a ''commercial'' picture, found himself unable to make such a film that wasn't simultaneously a devastating critique of commercial movies, or whether he initially decided to make a movie solely concerned with other movies, his real socio-political concerns thus being at two removes from reality.

Each is possible, but neither possibility is anywhere near as interesting as some of the throw-away moments in the great Fassbinder films, starting with ''Katzelmacher'' and going on through ''Despair'' and ''The Marriage of Maria Braun.'' Vincent Canby 'Neath a Lamp Post LILI MARLEEN, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder; screenplay by Manfred Purzer in association with Joshua Sinclair; film editors, Franz Walsch and Juliane Lorenz; photography, Eaver Schwarzenberger; music by Peer Raben; produced by Luggi Waldleitner in association with Enzo Peri; released by United Artists. At the Cinema 1, Third Avenue and 60th Street. Running time: 120 minutes. This film is not rated. Robert .............................Giancarlo Giannini Willie ................................Hanna Schygulla David Mendelsson ...........................Mel Ferrer Henkel ..........................Karl Heinz von Hassel Von Strehlow ............................Erik Schumann Taschner ....................................Hark Bohm Aaron ..................................Gottfried John Anna Lederer ...............................Karin Baal Miriam .............................Christine Kaufmann Drewitz ......................................Udo Kier Kauffmann .................................Roger Fritz