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As You Desire Me (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) may or may not be Greta Garbo's adieu to cinema. Miss Garbo says it is. Others say that she will go home to Sweden soon, leaving the impression she will not come back, then return in the autumn in a new blaze of carefully prepared publicity. In any event, As You Desire Me is a fitting conclusion, no matter how temporary, to the legend that Garbo has created for herself—enigmatic, moody, sometimes phlegmatic, sometimes emotional, a person of mystery whom nobody knows.
Director George Fitzmaurice has tinkered the plot of Luigi Pirandello's play to the extent of supplying a suitable screen finish, but in one important particular—the failure to establish the heroine's identity—he remains true to the original. The story contemplates the ravages of the War. Soldiers invade the home of Maria in Italy, ravish her, leave her practically out of her senses. Her memory gone, she wanders away while her faithful spouse (Melvyn Douglas) searches far & wide. That much is reported in the conversational manner of the stage. The action opens ten years later when Zara (Miss Garbo), a singer in a Budapest cafe, is recognized, supposedly, as the missing Maria, brought back to Italy. But Zara remembers nothing. Reserved, unhappy, she fights shy of the man who insists he is her husband. Then her mood changes: she grows to love the man, becomes much like the painting of Maria which hangs upon the wall. She finds contentment.
Into this peaceful picture comes a bestial German novelist (Erich von Stroheim) whose mistress Zara (or Maria) had been during the ten-year interlude, bringing with him a demented creature who, represented as Maria, casts doubt that Garbo is the wife of former years. Here Director Fitzmaurice departs from the Pirandello script: Pirandello lets Zara go off again, leaving the play much as it started; Fitzmaurice lets her remain.
By no means a great or flawless composition, As You Desire Me shows Garbo at her best, displaying chameleon-like qualities usually denied her, starting with the embittered Budapest mistress who is as cold as she is tough; continuing through her first days back in Italy, shy, sullen, retrospective; ending with her as wholesome and fresh as the young ladies with schoolgirl complexions.