Who Desires Whom?

rmax304823

I kept wondering about the referent in the movie's title: "Desire Me." Who's supposed to be desired, and who to do the desiring? I finally decided that it didn't matter who desired whom, as long as the imperative statement fit the title melody. And it did. I think it became a pop song with appropriately deranged lyrics. The theme SOUNDS like a nascent pop song, just waiting for the right words to make adolescents of 1947 swoon and weep.

But the only sobs in the audience would come from the young girls, not the boys who would be grinding their teeth with impatience and wondering when something was going to happen.

It's the end of the war and Greer Garson lives in a rather splendid house overlooking the French coast. She's waiting for her husband, Robert Mitchum, to return from the German reprisal camp where he's supposedly being held. A man in a ragged uniform hurries along the beach and climbs to the house, throws open the door, and enters with a big smile, finding everything as familiar as he'd hoped. He sits at the piano and begins to play Garson's and Mitchum's love song, called "Desire Me." It's not Mitchum though. Mitchum gets second billing but I don't know why. He only shows up for the last few minutes of the movie. This guy we're watching now is an intruder, Richard Hart, a handsome young man with whom Mitchum shared all his memories of home while both were confined to the reprisal camp.

Hart explains all this to Garson, and adds that he himself saw Mitchum shot to death while trying to escape. Upon hearing this, Garson, who was mooning over Mitchum, thinking he was still alive, is nonplussed. Out of loneliness and because Hart seems as familiar with the place as Mitchum had been, almost his Doppelganger, she invites Hart to stick around. Eventually, she becomes plussed, and the two melt into an embrace. Fade to the ocean crashing on the rocks, an electrical storm whipping the pine trees into a fury of motion, an atomic explosion, a covey of quail taking frantic flight, a locomotive rushing into a tunnel, a laser display in Las Vegas, an anamorphic tornado destroying a village in Indiana, a hypodermic syringe insinuating itself into a vein, the shriek of a shoat being swallowed whole by a python, the levitating ecstacy of St. Teresa.

It's a small French town and gossip is the chief means of social control. Soon there is a visit from the estimable George Zucco as the local padre. "My dear child, you must realize the unseemly nature of this...." It develops that Hart isn't quite the desperately lonely ex-prisoner he seems to be. Ex-prisoner, yes, but also rootless psychopath and arrogant ex-delinquent. And, oh, yes, liar too. Mitchum wasn't killed after all. He returns home just in time to find that his wife is about to run away with Hart. He's a little bitter about that. There is a climactic fight, followed by a tearful resolution amid the fields of swaying wildflowers.

The story is told from Garson's point of view, almost entirely. We know as much as she knows. We may sense she's being taken advantage of by John Hart but it isn't until later that we realize how deliberately manipulative he's been. And when Mitchum finally shows up and is irritated by finding her in her new arrangement, she is able to rearrange the emotional array and blame HIM for sharing the secrets of his home life with a stranger! Here she is, putting out for some guy she doesn't even know, because she's lonesome and horny -- and it's all Mitchum's fault for not writing more often. Whew! She's a victim no matter how you look at it.

If you enjoy this kind of movie -- and it's not badly done of it's type -- then you'll enjoy this movie.

score 5/10

rmax304823 1 October 2010

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2318246/