Lilli Marlene is a 1950 British war film aimed for the US market[citation needed] and directed by Arthur Crabtree.

[4] It was written by Leslie Wood and stars Lisa Daniely, Hugh McDermott, and Richard Murdoch.

A French girl named Lilli Marlene, working in her uncle's café in Benghazi, Libya, turns out to be the girl that the popular German wartime song Lili Marleen had been written for before the war, so both the British and the Germans try to use her for propaganda purposes – especially as it turns out that she can sing as well.

The Germans try to snatch her at one point, but don't succeed, and she performs several times for the British troops and also appears in radio broadcasts to the USA, arranged by Steve, an American war correspondent embedded with the British Eighth Army, who eventually becomes her boyfriend.

He informs them and the security people that Lilli was never a traitor, and that, in all her communications, there were encoded messages to the British intelligence services back in London.