The second installment of Fassbinder’s BDR trilogy draws generously from Josef von Sternberg’s classic of corruption, The Blue Angel. Sharing a name with Marlene Dietrich’s calculating chanteuse, Lola (dynamic Barbara Sukowa) is a singer at a Bavarian bordello and the mistress to Schukert (Mario Adorf), a shady developer. But to newly arrived building commissioner Von Bohm (Armin Mueller-Stahl, his usual pillar of rectitude), Lola is a poor single mother and an upright citizen. He falls in love with her, oblivious to her true nature and involvement with Schukert, his municipal adversary. Fassbinder uses candy colors and baroque lighting to embroider a world of profligacy, attributing the “Economic Miracle” of Germany’s renaissance in the 1950s to venality and vice.