In 1956, producer Fritz Gerhardt auditioned 12,000 girls before selecting fifteen-year-old Marion Michael as Germany's answer to Brigitte Bardot. He then sent her to Africa to swing through jungle sets in a loincloth.

The resulting film was a massive box office success. Jean-Luc Godard praised it. The villain was played by Reggie Nalder, whose face was so naturally menacing that he would later play the vampire Barlow in Salem's Lot essentially without makeup. There was a sequel.

LIANE, JUNGLE GODDESS (1956) is a West German adventure film directed by Eduard von Borsody, based on a novel published the same year, in which a German expedition in Africa discovers a beautiful blonde girl worshipped as a goddess by a local tribe, brings her back to Hamburg against her will, and discovers she may be the long-lost granddaughter of a wealthy shipping magnate.

The first act is jungle adventure with liberal amounts of stock footage of African wildlife and dancing. The film then pivots entirely into a Hamburg inheritance thriller with a murderous nephew. Hardy Krüger plays the hero. The toco toucan photographed in the opening African wildlife sequence is native to South America.

Marion Michael was fifteen when the film was made and handled her scenes with a guileless ease that made the character work in a way a more technically accomplished performance might not have.

A 1996 German television biopic about her life after the film documented what happened to the girl who became briefly famous and then found the industry moving on. She was still working sporadically in films when it aired.

The film was sold to over thirty countries and played matinees in the United States in 1959, double-billed, on at least one documented occasion, with Plan 9 from Outer Space.