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"As famous as Silent Night," the titular ballad at WWII's onset, its warbler has her own resistible rise to sort through. The chanteuse (Hanna Schygulla) has a middling voice and bowlegs but enough luck to score a hit that lifts her from Zurich small-timer to Aryan emblem in Berlin. ("More feeling," she's told at the recording studio, her maiden performance leads to a barroom brawl.) "A tearjerker stinking of death" is the verdict from Goebbels, which scarcely dampens the enthusiasm of the top critic behind glowing portals. Stardom comes between her from her true love (Giancarlo Giannini), whose Jewish family is part of a daring anti-Nazi group and who's eventually tortured with endless loops of the heroine's signature tune. "Da sagten wir auf Wiedersehen—Da sagten wir auf Wiedersehen—Da sagten wir auf Wiedersehen..." The Third Reich's bilious blend of politics and spectacle, mordantly imagined by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as a sort of lost Susan Hayward melodrama. The regime needs its siren, she remains naïve as her voice alternates with bombs and machine-guns, "it's just a song." The resistance leader is a familiar bearded face half-glimpsed behind a trenchcoat, the Berlin Alexanderplatz forest has a cameo. Glazed surfaces for emotional espionage, cf. Edwards' Darling Lili, expressive colors in spades: Smudged lights under a downpour at a border parting, a scarlet slash of lipstick in a cavernous all-white boudoir, trysting figures at night illuminated by infernal explosions. The lovesick pianist (Hark Bohm) stands by the muse all the way to the blasted battlefield, the rebel's return is a transaction negotiated by his moneyed papa (Mel Ferrer). "It's tricky, because good jokes are political." Szabó's Mephisto discards Fassbinder's wit and style and gets the Oscar, naturally. With Karl-Heinz von Hassel, Erik Schumann, Gottfried John, Karin Baal, Christine Kaufmann, Udo Kier, Roger Fritz, Adrian Hoven, Barbara Valentin, Helen Vita, and Brigitte Mira.
--- Fernando F. Croce |