Sagrado e Profano

Its structure is intense. The way it's edited kept me always on the tip of my toes. I was biting my nails through half of it, and feeling a nervous guilt in the pit of my stomach through the other half. This movie has it all, from one of the best escape scenes ever, to a whole spectrum of emotional truths. I found myself switching my opinions many times about the characters and what actions they should take. All the way through the ending, I was proud for the people who lent their efforts to make this movie. The acting and cinematography are unbeatable. I repeat, unbeatable! It might not be air-tight in plot details, but it gets a certain sense of cinematic perfection across that can also be found in other 1947 movies like "Out of the Past" and "Black Narcissus". I love those movies just as much as this one, if not more, so it's a little baffling how hard people are ragging on it.

It seems like the making of the movie was beset by hardship, and left a bad taste in the mouth of a lot of the cast and crew, but I see no reason that it should leave a bad taste in our mouths. It's just too gorgeous a movie to forget about. And any hardship and injury that came of it only makes the cinematic achievement that much more astounding. But ultimately, this movie's greatest achievement is that it surprisingly exudes a maturity that is more common in movies made closer to the present, for example, Mike Leigh's morality-play movies "Vera Drake" (2004) and "Another Year" (2010). It's time "Desire Me" had a re-evaluation, if you ask me.

"Desire Me" from 1947 was a troubled film, with everyone hating everyone else, and George Cukor having his name removed from the credits. If only some of that passion had been on the screen, we might have a movie to talk about.

As it is, "Desire Me" is the old story of a French woman, Marise (Greer Garson) who doesn't know if her husband, last heard of in a work camp, is dead or alive. A friend of his, Jean (Richard Hart) comes to see her.

Her husband Paul (Robert Mitchum) was his friend at the camp, and talked about Marise incessantly. Jean knows all about her, and he was kept alive by Paul's stories. He felt he just had to meet her. He breaks the news to her that Paul is dead. Yeah, and guess what.

First of all, you can see this plot coming a mile away. Secondly, though we hear about this great love that Paul and Marise have, we don't see any of it in flashbacks, just their wedding. Third, Jean is such an obvious phony, determined to push his way into her house and life, that it's ridiculous.

The name Richard Hart didn't conjure up much for me, and after seeing him in this, I know why. Sadly he died four years later, at the age of 35, which is awful.

I would say he was completely misdirected in this. The character of Jean (my opinion only) should have been warm, sincere, helpful, without a hint of pushiness so that he can inculcate himself into Marise's life.

Robert Mitchum ultimately doesn't have much to do. He spent most of his time eating sandwiches with onion and Roquefort when he had scenes with Greer Garson, whom he thought was stuck-up. Cukor and Garson fought, and Cukor left the film.

For all that, the film is quite atmospheric, with enough dry ice creating fog that you almost couldn't see anyone.

Greer Garson is good given the material.

If you're a fan of hers, watch this film; if not, skip it.

"Desire Me" is a mess of a film. No director wanted to take credit for it. And the stars have absolutely no chemistry.

But this is supposed to be a love story about undeniable passions between a widow who steadfastly grieves her husband and a man who claims to have known him when he was alive. Unfortunately, the script makes him feel more like a bully than a lover. Greer Garson plays the object of his attentions. She is no prize herself. Her motivations are muddy, her outlook morose, and she seems to (willingly) be a victim of the gossipmongers of the town--including the local cleric--who presume to judge her.

Watching "Desire Me" is drudgery. None of the characters are very likable. And the payoff for watching the film is a final sequence that lacks the intended suspense, then concludes with an emotionally inappropriate ending, leaving the viewer with a feeling of betrayal.

None of the major players or the directors felt pride after making this film. And it shows.

Director George Cukor was so unhappy with his production of "Desire Me," that he insisted that his name be taken off the opening credits. It was the first film M-G-M had ever released without one. No happy memories about the filming for Greer Garson either. During the filming of one scene, which was by the ocean, a wave came up unexpectedly and swept the star out to sea. She nearly drowned!

This film is an atrocious failure on many levels.

It is emblematic of the loss of imagination and the draining of talent of the studio system in the late forties when confronted with the genius of European productions of the same time, especially Italian neo-realism.

To begin with, the subject is extremely derivative. It is based on a German play that had already been made into a successful film in 1928 in Germany. This play was inspired, like a whole family of plays and films of the era, by a real event that took place in Italy in the 20's (the Bruneri-Canella case). This case also inspired the 1938 French film "Carrefour" (set in France and remade in Hollywood as "Crossroads"). This French film was later remade in England in 1940 as "Dead Man's Shoes". The same story inspired Pirandello's "As You Desire Me", set in Italy, in the late 20's, which became a Greta Garbo vehicle in the 30's, as well as the novel "The Wife of Martin Guerre" by American writer Janet Lewis (1941), a story set in France in the Middle Ages, which became the French film "The Return of Martin Guerre" (Daniel Vigne, 1982), which was of course remade as a Hollywood film starring Richard Gere, "Sommersby" (Jon Amiel, 1993) and set after the US Civil War. The same Italian story also inspired Edward Wool's 1935 play "Libel!" (filmed in 1959 in England), which has several similarities with the classic film "Random Harvest" (1942).

As if the story was not tired enough, the big mistake was to transpose a German play about the aftermath of the First World War in a post-WWII French Brittany setting - filmed on the back lot - that just doesn't gel. The sets appear to be the ones used for the South of France in "Song of Bernadette" and the music by (the ordinarily trustworthy) Herbert Stothart is unconvincing in its attempt to convey any real sense of France or Brittany. Everything in the art direction is stilted and false. Its un-Frenchness is almost frightening. The viewer may get an occasional glimpse of O'Neil, Strindberg, Ibsen, Murnau and Rossellini, but never, never of a French fishing village.

The subject and acting try very hard to reconnect the story to some sense of lustful reality while channelling something of the drama and realism of European serious cinema. But they fail. Imagining Robert Mitchum and Greer Garson as a French fisherman and his wife is simply an exercise quite beyond anyone's powers of self-deception.

The end result is a cumbersome imitation of European simplicity with misfiring Hollywood production values, an embarrassingly stodgy melodrama that tries very hard to be a thoughtful little art film. It stinks and it sinks and it will forever remain as an example of one of the first signs of decadence of Hollywood's golden era.