Abstract
As You Desire Me (George Fitzmaurice), a little-known Hollywood film from 1932, adapted from Luigi Pirandello’s 1930 modernist play Come tu mi vuoi, is ripe for reassessment: situated in its historical and industrial context, it can be read as a site where multiple critical issues regarding the adaptation process itself intersect.1 In doing so, it is possible to investigate the value of European literature to Hollywood at a particular moment in the Hollywood studio system – a value which is, of course, both commercial and cultural. The film has been dismissed by Pirandello criticism because of its failure as an adaptation (a failure generally attributed to its lack of fidelity).2 However, moving away from a narrative of adaptation as infidelity, betrayal and decline can open up the question of how the cinematic apparatus itself (and the cinema industry) recasts the key tropes of Pirandello’s play: performance, theatricality and identity. In this regard, I will also examine the film’s casting of Greta Garbo, icon of ‘European otherness’ (McDonald 2000: 49) in the lead role of the Italian heroine, and how this casting, and Garbo’s performance and persona, contribute towards a complex reworking of the Pirandellian idea of identity.
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Filmography
As You Desire Me, George Fitzmaurice, US, 1932.
Blue Angel, The (Der Blaue Engel), Josef von Sternberg, Germany, 1930.
Feu Mathias Pascal, Marcel l’Herbier, France, 1925.
Grand Hotel, Edmund Goulding, US, 1932.
Mata Hari, George Fitzmaurice, US, 1931.
Ninotchka, Ernst Lubitsch, US, 1939.
Queen Christina, Rouben Mamoulian, US, 1933.
Son of the Sheik, George Fitzmaurice, US, 1926.
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© 2007 Catherine O’Rawe
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O’Rawe, C. (2007). From Pirandello to MGM: When Classical Hollywood Reads European Literature. In: Cooke, P. (eds) World Cinema’s ‘Dialogues’ with Hollywood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230223189_5
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