Set in Budapest in the Twenties, As You Desire Me is a strange romance indeed, based on a Pirandello play about an amnesiac who returns to a husband she can't really remember, in order to escape the hypnotic sadist who is her current lover. As cafe singer and sadist, respectively, Greta Garbo and Erich von Stroheim battle it out - she in bleached wig, he with shaved head - in a memorable early scene. Melvyn Douglas is definitely the husband, but whether Garbo is the wife remains the question, something Variety called a "poetic riddle" in its 1932 review: "Story is far from film formula.... In short, the original hasn't been broadly hoked for the flicker medium.... The studio sought to preserve the play's poetic quality.... Result is admirable for Pirandello followers...."