Desire Me (MGM, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Greatest on Wednesday, October 28 my husband Charles and I watched a highly quirky 1947 romantic melodrama from MGM called Desire Me, starring Greer Garson, Robert Mitchum, and a new discovery named Richard Hart whom MGM had great hopes for, judging from how they promoted him in the trailer. The film began life as a 1926 novel by German Expressionist writer Leonhard Frank called Carl and Anna, and the screenwriting credits are Casey Robinson for “adaptation” and Marguerite Roberts and Zoë Akins for the actual script. At one point Robinson had refused to take credit for any screenwriting he hadn’t done entirely by himself; he wrote the love scenes between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca but, because he declined credit, he did himself out of the Academy Award won by Casablanca’s other writers, Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch. I guess Robinson learned his lesson, and indeed the plots of Casablanca and Desire Me have one major commonality: they both feature heroines who have adulterous affairs but don’t realize they’re doing so because they think their husbands are dead. Desire Me takes place on an island off the coast of Brittany in northern France, and the heroine is Marise Aubert (Greer Garson, who’s referred to as a redhead in the dialogue; she was a redhead for real, too, but we hardly ever got to see her that way because she made so few films in color). She had been born and raised in Paris until she met Paul Aubert (Robert Mitchum), who married her and brought her back to the fishing village in Brittany where he’d grown up. Then World War II started and Paul got into the French army, only he didn’t serve very long because he was quickly taken prisoner by the Germans and put in what was called a “reprisal camp,” a particularly nasty POW camp reserved for troublemakers who tried to escape multiple times. Paul befriended a fellow prisoner named Jean Renaud (Richard Hart), who before the war had been a scapegrace thief in Paris, and told him extensive details about his life in Brittany that made Jean fall in long-distance love with Marise despite not having met her. Then the two try to escape from the prison camp, only they’re recaptured by the Germans and Paul is apparently killed.

All this happens in the backstory or in a few flashback scenes; the entire movie is a flashback told by Marise to her doctor in Paris, André Leclair (veteran character actor Cecil Humphreys), and as is typical for a Robinson script there are flashbacks within the flashback. When the film opens the war has just ended and Marise is still living on the island and mourning the loss of Paul. Jean shows up and uses his extensive knowledge of her life with Paul to seduce her (though given the limitations of the Production Code it’s almost certain they don’t get to do the down ‘n’ dirty with each other), and midway through the film they’re preparing to get married and flee with each other to Paris when Paul turns up, not dead after all. Naturally he’s fiercely jealous of Jean, and the two have a long confrontation scene in which Jean is armed with a gun and Paul with a knife. Jean tries to shoot Paul but keeps missing him – Paul grimly jokes that Jean was never any good with a gun, and that’s probably why he was so easily captured by the Germans in the first place – and eventually Jean falls off a cliff into the sea and drowns. Then the film cuts back to the scene between Marise and her doctor in Paris; Dr. Leclair assures her that there’s nothing wrong with her physically, and in the end she returns to Brittany and reunites with Paul. What makes Desire Me a particularly strange movie is that there isn’t a director credit: just the writers and producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr. (whose name is in cursive script, as was usual for him). According to imdb.com, four directors actually worked on the film: Jack Conway, George Cukor, Mervyn LeRoy, and Victor Saville. The cinematographer was Joseph Ruttenberg, and as Charles pointed out afterwards, though it’s really a Gothic melodrama rather than a film noir Desire Me looks more like a noir than some of the borderline cases Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller has been showing lately.

The entire musical score by Herbert Stothart is based on a French sing called “Vous Qui Passez Sans Me Voir,” written by Johnny Hess, which though it isn’t sung on the soundtrack serves much the same purpose as “As Time Goes By” did in Casablanca. Its bittersweet lyrics not only don’t reflect the plot but actually seem at cross purposes with it; it’s about a man who sees his ex on the street and is miffed that she makes no sign of recognition towards him (the title literally means “You who pass by without seeing me”), while Marise has the opposite problem: two actual or potential mates instead of zero. (There’s another pre-existing song in the film: Maurice Chevalier’s 1925 hit “Valentine,” composed by Henri Christiné with lyrics by Albert Willemetz, which Marise plays as an instrumental on the piano in her cottage.) Desire Me has obvious references not only to Casablanca but a previous Garson vehicle, Random Harvest, filmed in 1942 with Ronald Colman co-starring as a World War I veteran who suffers from amnesia that causes him temporarily to forget that they were a couple before the war. Incidentally, while filming one of the beachfront storm scenes with Richard Hart, Greer Garson was swept up by a wave and injured her back so severely she spent several years and some painful surgeries to recover. Also an imdb.com “Trivia” item reports that “it took Greer Garson dozens of takes to enunciate the word ‘no’ to the director’s satisfaction. Co-star Robert Mitchum claimed later that this incident was when he first stopped taking Hollywood seriously.” One wonders which director that was; the incident anticipates what Billy Wilder put Marilyn Monroe through on the set of Some Like It Hot when he had her repeat the line, “Where’s the bourbon?,” over 64 takes. Desire Me is not by any standards a great, or even particularly good, movie (and one wonders why Robert Mitchum gets second billing when he only has about 20 minutes of screen time), but it has a haunting quality that makes up for its deficiencies and renders it surprisingly watchable.