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Best movie of this year hands down!

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

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.

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.

After seeing Desire Me, I looked in Lee Server's new book about Robert Mitchum. He was as unhappy as with the film as everyone else was in 1947. The film is set in postwar Brittany and it has to do with Richard Hart arriving in a small Breton fishing village. He's decided to look up Greer Garson who's the widow of a former buddy Robert Mitchum from a POW camp. He woos and wins her and then Mitchum shows up.I have to say that Mitchum, Garson, and Hart are about as convincingly French as Barry Fitzgerald. And the story is just something you want to shout to the screen, get it over with, the story just plods along so. For MGM the film location for Brittany was the California coast at Monterey. Another reviewer mentioned about Garson nearly being drowned with a sudden wave during a scene on the beach. I'm sure that caused her to lose interest in the film. Mitchum and Garson hated each other. In typical Mitchum fashion for what he felt was Garson's condescending ways, he used to eat sandwiches with onions and roquefort cheese before their closeups. That ain't a look of passion Garson's giving out with when you see this.Because Cukor got into a fight with Garson as opposed to Mitchum who was in on a pass from that inferior studio RKO, he quit the film. Mervyn LeRoy came on, Jack Conway came on, a few others did who had a spare moment or two and the thing was finished. Not a moment too soon.And NO ONE wanted to be listed as director. So the film was inflicted on the public without a directorial credit. My only question is, if this thing had turned out like Gone With the Wind which was another collaborative effort, who would have gotten the Oscar nomination for Best Director?

As has been noted elsewhere, during the filming of "Desire Me," Ms. Garson and Richard Hart were swept into the sea by a wave along the rocky coast of California. She nearly lost her life, and as it was, sustained severe injuries that required several surgeries. All this for a misfire of a film.If not for the luminous presence of Greer Garson, this movie wouldn't be worth anyone's time. Considering the cast and director (George Cukor, who removed his name from the credits before the film's release) it's a wonder how it turned out so relatively poor. One would think the script's weaknesses should have been readily apparent. {SPOILERS AHEAD} The outline of the plot is fine: Paul (Robert Mitchum) is imprisoned during WW-II in a German POW camp. He spends his time telling a fellow prisoner, Jean (Hart), details about his life with his wife, Marise (Garson). Jean, whose life has been less than idyllic, becomes absorbed in these tales, and soon begins to think of these stories as HIS stories. When he and Paul attempt escape, Paul is shot, but Jean succeeds. He goes to Paul's home he has come to know so well and tries to claim Marise, who has been faithfully waiting for Paul for several years, as his own--in spite of the fact that he knows (or at least strongly suspects) that Paul is actually still alive. That outline could have been turned into a fine film--but the details were its undoing. Crucial to the story is the devotion Marise and Paul have toward each other.Unfortunately, this supposed great love is spoken of, but never dramatized. We get one brief flashback of their marriage ceremony. We don't see their love grow, never observe its intensity. Yet we are supposed to be invested in their relationship. Without that investment the final reconciliation fails to move us, and so the ending falls flat. An even bigger failing is how the relationship between Marise and Jean plays out. He immediately begins to pressure her to form a relationship with him--this in spite of the fact that until he tells her that he saw Paul die, Marise still believed him to be alive. No matter how lonely she might have been in the years she awaited Paul's return, she obviously would need some months to grieve her loss. To have someone pushing her into a relationship the very day she hears the news would be off putting to say the least--terrifying and enraging being even more likely reactions. Instead, we are to believe that Marise would experience only some relatively vague misgivings, and within about a week is sufficiently recovered to consider marrying this man (so much for this supposed great love between Paul and Marise). For this bit of absurdity to work, all one would need do is, first, provide more background (lots more background) to the relationship between Marise and Paul. Second, make Jean more crafty. Instead of fairly pouncing on Marise, have him offer his friendship and support. Have their relationship grow over the course of MONTHS, not days. These two changes alone might have turned the movie into a classic--IF Ms. Garson and Mr. Mitchum could have developed some chemistry between them. As it stands, they had none. With only 4 minutes of screen time together, how much could they be expected to generate? It's too bad. They were two such great stars . . . it would have been interesting to see them together. Still, for all its considerable faults, I give the film a 5 out of 10 on the basis of the great Greer Garson's presence, some great cinematography and an interesting, if poorly realized, premise. All in all, it's too bad Ms. Garson didn't elect to work in some other, more rewarding--and less painful--project.