Set in Budapest in the 1920s, As You Desire Me is a strange romance indeed, and unusual Hollywood fare for the thirties which was made all the more unusual by MGM's attempt to preserve the poetic qualities of the Pirandello play on which it is based. The story concerns an amnesiac cafe singer who returns to a husband she can't really remember, in order to escape the sadistic hypnotist lover she wants to forget. As singer and sadist, respectively, Greta Garbo and Erich von Stroheim battle it out in some unsettlingly erotic scenes, she in a bleached-blonde wig, he with his shaved head. Melvyn Douglas is definitely the husband, but whether Garbo is the wife remains the question throughout this absorbing riddle of identity.