As You Desire Me (MGM, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched two surprisingly compelling movies from the early 1930’s that I’d got from a grey-label source (and which played surprisingly well given the tracking problems I’ve had with grey-label DVD’s recently). The first was As You Desire Me, a 1932 romantic melodrama from MGM originating in a play by the avant-garde Italian author Luigi Pirandello. He was a writer whose main themes were memory and the loss of sanity – he’s most famous for Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which the titular six characters make an appearance in the middle of a play about other people and plead for recognition, though my favorite Pirandello play is Henry IV, in which a rich aristocrat becomes delusional and thinks he is the medieval German emperor Henry IV. In hopes of keeping him relatively happy until they can figure out how to cure him, his therapists decide to indulge his delusion, outfitting rooms on his estate to look like a medieval palace, enlisting his friends to take on the roles of Henry IV’s courtiers, and getting every book they can find on the real Henry IV to make their reconstruction as accurate as possible. In the end the aristocrat overcomes his delusion and realizes he’s not Henry IV – but his friends and associates have got into their own roles so far they don’t want to give them up.

As You Desire Me – at least as presented here in an adaptation by Gene Markey, with visually luscious direction by silent-era veteran George Fitzmaurice (of whom Carol Easton, in her biography of Sam Goldwyn, once said, “He made bad pictures beautifully” – though I wouldn’t call As You Desire Me a bad picture: it’s a quite good one and benefits from Fitzmaurice’s visual flair) – is hardly as audacious as Six Characters or Henry IV but it’s still a challenging tale, a good deal more sophisticated than most of the Hollywood fare of the time. Greta Garbo stars as Zara, who when the film opens in Budapest in 1925 is doing a cabaret act in a nightclub. She also has a number of wealthy and not-so-wealthy men crowding around her, obviously wanting to have sex with her, and they supply her with an endless amount of champagne even though she’s undecided as to whether she actually likes the stuff. In fact, she’s undecided about a lot of things, including her own past, about which she hasn’t a clue, or at least claims not to have a clue. (Interestingly, Garbo is not actually shown performing – we hear her voice double on the soundtrack but apparently she dodged the task of actually lip-synching on screen, so her performance is presented only as background sound while the intrigues among the nightclub’s customers, including the people who are trying to get her to have sex with them, go on around her.)

Though she seems free with her affections – this is a 1932 movie and definitely a part of the so-called “pre-Code” era – she’s being kept by internationally famous writer Carl Salter (Erich von Stroheim, with much less of an accent than usual), who bemusedly accepts her outside love interests, confident that he’s paying enough to support her that she’s not going anywhere. Things change when she gets a visit from Tom Boffle (Owen Moore, Mary Pickford’s first husband and a beefy leading man who hung around for a bit after sound came in), who insists that cabaret entertainer Zara (who performs wearing a visually striking platinum-blonde wig) is really Maria Varelli, estranged wife of Tom’s friend, Italian Count Bruno Varelli (Melvyn Douglas, in his first of three films with Garbo – the others, Ninotchka and Two-Faced Woman, came at the very end of her career in 1939 and 1941, respectively). Though she’s not sure whether she’s really Maria or not, she agrees to go with Tom to the Varelli estate in Italy and at least pretend to remember the details of their past life together.

They seem to be heading for a happy reunion despite the clear upset of Brono’s sister Ines Montari (Hedda Hopper, showing surprising authority for a woman far better remembered as a gossip columnist than an actress – later, of course, Hopper and Stroheim would reunite on screen at the end of Sunset Boulevard), until a jealous Carl Salter turns up and announces that Zara turned up as “Maria” just two weeks shy of the 10th anniversary of the original Maria’s disappearance. This is significant because the estate on which Bruno is living so lavishly really belongs to the Montari family, and if Maria hadn’t turned up in 10 years, under Italian law she would have been declared legally dead and her sister Ines would have taken over the estate. Salter not only accuses Bruno, Tom and Zara of arranging a deliberate impersonation, he even brings forth a woman from a mental hospital named Lucia Marco (Nella Walker, though a part of me wishes they had amplified Pirandello’s point about the confusion of identities by having Garbo play this part, too) whom he claims is the real Maria Varelli. But Bruno and Tom question whether Lucia is the real Maria – the servants, who have been on Bruno’s household staff long enough to have known the real Maria, insist that Lucia is not she – and in the end they throw Salter out and Zara, Maria or whoever she is really decides she’s genuinely in love with Bruno and will stay on as his wife regardless.

As You Desire Me is a stunning production, surprisingly short (70 minutes) for a vehicle for a major star, but well constructed within the framework of romantic suffering audiences expected from Garbo. Samuel Marx, who worked as MGM’s story editor during the 1930’s, later wrote a book about the relationship between MGM’s top executives, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, and in one of his interviews for it he said that while audiences liked seeing MGM’s other major women stars, Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford, alive and suitably paired off with their leading men, “audiences always wanted to see Garbo die.” Actually, there aren’t that many films in which Garbo dies (including one infamous example – the 1927 silent film Love, her first adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, in which in the European release Anna commits suicide by throwing herself under a train as in Tolstoy’s novel, but in the U.S. version she and her leading man, John Gilbert, ended up alive and together), but though As You Desire Me doesn’t have a tragic ending the most convincing aspect of Garbo’s performance is her mental uncertainty. She disappeared, after all, while World War I was in full swing and the Varelli estate was being occupied by German or Austrian troops (Italy fought on the same side as Britain, France, Russia and the U.S. in World War I, though they were allied with Germany and Japan in World War II), and the script hints at a quite modern understanding of what’s now called post-traumatic stress disorder being at the roots of Garbo’s character’s mental illness.

Garbo also wanted Erich von Stroheim in the film because she’d long admired his work as both actor and director, but when he reported for the film Stroheim was still suffering from an injury on his previous film, The Lost Squadron. A former stunt man, Stroheim had insisted on taking a long fall down stairs when his character is shot and killed in that film, and he’d broken two ribs. Stroheim was worried that if he called in sick, MGM would decide he was too much trouble and replace him. Garbo told him that whenever he felt too ill or in much pain to work, he should call her and she would call in sick. Oddly, Melvyn Douglas had a bad experience with Stroheim; in one of the few negative comments on Thomas Quinn Curtiss’s mostly adulatory Stroheim biography, Douglas said, “I had looked forward to meeting him, regarding him as a true genius for his Foolish Wives and Greed in particular. But he was rude and common, and had such a hopeless stutter that his scenes had to be shot over and over again – angle by angle, phrase by phrase. I was very surprised that a man who had shown such gifts had no subtlety, no savoir-faire, and was what is called today a square.” Douglas’s own performance in As You Desire Me is a bit stuck-up – in his later films with Garbo he’s a lot looser, more natural and more credibly romantic – and Owen Moore, as usual, is professionally competent but little more, but As You Desire Me remains a quite awesome film (I’d seen it twice before but I liked it considerably better this time around) and an example of the economy of storytelling in classic Hollywood: the ability of the movie professionals of the 1930’s to tell an emotionally complex story in about half the running time modern-day filmmakers would expend on it.