Cheap As You Desire Me (Video) (Greta Garbo) (George Fitzmaurice) Price

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Customer Reviews of As You Desire Me

BABY, I'M YOURS...
This is a poorly executed film that is based upon a play by Luigi Pirandello. The film opens onto a high end supper club in Budapest, where violins are playing and a chanteuse, an amnesiac who calls herself Zara (Greta Garbo), is singing to a packed audience. The languorous and world weary Zara leaves the stage, pursued by a number of enamored and decidedly unattractive stage door Johnnies of all ages, and they proceed to paint the town red.

When they arrive at Zara's home, they are greeted by the mysterious Count Salter (Erich von Stroheim), the man with whom she lives. While Zara is busy entertaining all but the audience of this film, an artist named Tony Boffie (Owen Moore) enters their home, addressing her as Maria, a woman whose portrait he painted years ago and who has been missing for ten years. Zara suddenly decides to leave with Tony, leaving the Count in a snit.

Zara and Tony go to Italy where, it turns out, a certain Bruno Varelli (Melvyn Douglas) has been pining for his wife Maria for the past ten years. It appears that Maria had disappeared in the confusion of the Austrian invasion of Italy during Word War I. Zara has no recollection of her former life, yet she tries to meld in to this life that everyone but she recalls. It is also clear that her husband is still besotted by her, despite the long, lost years.

As time passes, Zara, now Maria, begins to look more and more like the woman that Tony Boffie painted, as some of the melancholia seems to leave her. Then, a series of twists and turns, as well as a malicious attempt by Count Salter to reclaim his former lover, turn the Varelli household upside down. The moment of truth has finally arrived.

This is a mediocre film that has Greta Garbo wearing a laughable, Jean Harlow style, platinum blonde wig during her Zara days. Disjointed in its telling of the story and poorly cast, the film plods along, sinking under its own torpor. The film has little to commend it, other than the ever alluring presence of Greta Garbo. It is no surprise that this film languished at the box office when first released. If one is not a Greta Garbo fan, one should deduct one star from my rating.

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As You Desire Me
"...there is nothing left in me, nothing in me, take me, take me and make me as you desire me!" Along with Gabriele D'Annunzio (poet and contemporary), Luigi Pirandello reigns an inspired playright. In his enigmatic 'As You Desire Me', Pirandello (b1867) grabs the world we think real and turns it inside out for us. A motley of frantic characters gather en scene, soon becoming lost in Pirandello's mischievous format. The explosive opening sets the mood of the play and establishes a theme of decadence. At the cortex pains a sublime amnesiac, soon we learn she is the reason-to-live of all. In the original Italian play Zara is known as La Ignotta (the unknown woman) In 'As You Desire Me' all players are promptly revealed as uncostumary theatrical metaphors, and soon the protagonist, the divine La Ignotta, is also lost in this mad delusionary conceptual design. What can be said about Thalberg's MGM's 'As You Desire Me? Perhaps, better, nothing. For us who admire Pirandello, also, D'Annunzio (his exquisite 'La gioconda' and 'la citta morta' legendary plays of Duse), this movie at first seems an aberration. The precocious theme twisted eternally in a macaw and senseless muddle. At first the movie appears only a clumpsy star vehicle. The Krupp diamond in a dime-store set. But there awaits a miracle. Perhaps not by accident a phantasmaghoric Garbo, en scene, alludes to all the intoxicating caprices in the original play. Despite Fitzmaurice's limitations and simplification of Pirandello. It's ultimately Garbo's wizardry that delivers the diaphanous riddles here. With her other-wordliness somehow she makes us forget that the author's original thought ran deeper. His brilliant attempt to illustrate, in his original tableaux, psychological and philosophical theorems to an intellectual and fastly decaying modern world. Triumphantly, before long, we realize Luigi Pirandello, the psyche manipulator, and Greta Garbo, the delicious ghost, make a good pair, and thus, succeed. Forgetting the banalities of the script. They are both elusive, but also effusive. Both 'Mata Hari' and 'As You Desire Me' were directed by George Fitzmaurivce in 1932; screenplay here by Gene Markey. In collaboration with the winning triumvirate of Adrian, William Daniels and Cedric Gibbons. 'Mata Hari' was a box-office bonanza alas 'As You Desire Me' languished (please look up my review of MGM's 'Mata Hari') It's curious these immense stories somehow lost their rightful thematic guideline. Indeed, of course, they remain luminous classics nevertheless. Take me, take me and make me as you desire me.

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AN ECCENTRIC VEHICLE FOR MISS GARBO
Zara (Garbo) is a cafe entertainer in Budapest. She has amnesia. Tony Boffie (Owen Moore) sees her and identifies her as Maria, the wife of Count Bruno Varelli (Melvyn Douglas). Boffie, a portrait painter, had done a painting of Maria at the time of her marriage. She was believed to have been killed when the Austrians invaded Italy during the war................This is a rather ludicrous vehicle for Garbo wherein she even wears a platinum blonde wig - I was glad when she got back to her own locks! Although this was Garbo's first film with Melvyn Douglas, they were to make a screen hit together seven years later in NINOTCHKA.