Lola

Set in a German town during the autumn of 1957, amid the economic recovery of the Adenauer era, Lola centres on a cabaret singer and prostitute who performs at a brothel run by her lover, the building contractor Schuckert. Schuckert effectively controls the town, keeping local notables in his debt through the construction boom. Into this arrangement comes von Bohm, a newly appointed building commissioner whose insistence on doing things properly threatens the comfortable corruption around him. He falls for Lola without knowing how she earns her living, and she sees marriage to him as a way into respectable society, while her ties to Schuckert remain. Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed, working from a screenplay he wrote with Peter Märthesheimer and Pea Fröhlich. Barbara Sukowa plays Lola, with Armin Mueller-Stahl as von Bohm and Mario Adorf as Schuckert. The film draws on Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel and belongs to the director's postwar Germany trilogy, made between The Marriage of Maria Braun and Veronika Voss.

The production was handled by WDR, Rialto Film and Trio Film, and runs 113 minutes. It arrived in 1981, roughly midway through the run of features listed for Fassbinder, after The Marriage of Maria Braun and before Lili Marleen. On TMDB it holds a rating of 6.9 from 142 votes, while critics were more enthusiastic, giving it 8 out of 10 across 15 reviews, so the critical response stands somewhat above the audience score.