Panamint Beautiful photography and wonderful atmospherics of early 60's Mexico as it was back then. It was a good era to visit Mexico as I remember, having been there for the first time in 1961 (yes I'm old). Merle Oberon looks beautiful and displays real star power. Steve Cochran strolls through the film portraying an engineer stuck in Mexico, loafing around waiting for equipment to arrive. Cochran is well cast since he was apparently a world-class loafer at times in his life. He would die amid mystery and sleaze a mere 2 years after the film's release, his rotting and putrid corpse found on a derelict boat in the Pacific Ocean, accompanied by two surviving female "attendants".Oberon's acting is good, but the role makes you wonder why anyone would care about the affairs of silly, spoiled rich woman "Katherine", her character in this film. Katherine, you need to see a shrink.Featuring good scenery and atmospherics vs. a shallow plot that drags especially toward the ending, this film will probably entertain Merle Oberon's fans. Other viewers must choose whether they have the time to invest watching this to experience Ms. Oberon's undeniable star power, or just skip it.

jotix100 Darkly handsome Steve Corey arrives in Mexico piloting his own plane. He has come to work with Paul Beckmann, a rich industrialist, in his mining concern. Before he can say "Buenos dias" he is whisked to the luxury mansion where he is going to be a guest. Katherine Beckmann, the half sister of Paul, catches his eye. She is an elegant woman with a past. She falls for Steve good looks right away and the inevitable happens that same night, as she guides him through the secret garden to her own play house, discreetly located around the corner from the big mansion.Thus begins this soap opera with tinges of high camp, which might not have been planned, but watching it today, looks a perfect film to show at a small party with friends. It could be priceless fun.Richard Rush is credited as the director of this film that was a vehicle for Merle Oberon, a gorgeous actress that had done much better in her career. Ms. Oberon, who loved Acapulco, might have influenced to have most of the film shot on location. Steve Cochran who used to be seen in the bad guy roles, is playing against type in here. Nothing makes sense in the film that feels like a travelogue. Enjoy the old feeling of Mexico in color.

dougbrode In the early 1960s, most of the old-time Hollywood female stars were going the Baby Jane/Sweet Charlotte route: Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Olivia de Havilland, and in time Talulah Bankhead, Shelley Winters, and Geraldine Page all played crazy old ladies in Gothic horrors good, bad, or indifferent. Not Merle Oberon. At a time when others of her age were either playing grandmothers on screen or retiring to play that role in real life, she continued to pursue the glamour girl route, with ever younger leading men. Of course, no big time Hollywood studio would touch her - think Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard going to C.B. De Mille in hopes that he'll cast her as an ingenue, only this time it's happening in real life - so she went off to Mexico and starred in little indie films of that era. She looked both good and scary at the same time - whether it was plastic surgery (as many suspected) or just eating healthy (as she claimed), Merle looked just like Margo in that moment when she's leaving The Lost Horizon, as the perfect face is about to collapse. Of Love and Desire is the most interesting of her projects, if a considerable let down from her class productions of the 1940s - the color looked faded even when the film was first released, and the film appeared to have been shot on stale celluloid. Still, this is a memorable, if hardly good, film. At a time when mainstream movies, this was the first serious (if at times unintentionally comic) attempt to deal with the issue of nymphomania in a non-descending way. Merle is the rich owner of a company who, when touched by any man, falls apart at the seams and goes to bed with him, mostly regretting it in the morning. Steve Cochran, in one of his last roles, plays her latest white collar worker who takes advantage of Merle (he's heard all about her proclivities from the man he replaces, played by Steve Brodie, no relation to me) and then realizes that he's falling in love with her. What the title actually means is, of love and lust - and the difficulty of telling them apart. Making things more intriguing still is that Merle's brother (Curt Jurgens) has never minded her affairs, but does mind that this new relationship may be 'for real' - because he's secretly in love with her, as the nymphomania theme gives way to potential incest. This was pretty heady stuff for 1963, and while it may be common enough today that such films show up on afternoon soap operas, things were different then - and people who saw the film, like myself, could never forget it, however tepid and at times even tedious the movie-making itself may be.

dimemories Although you have to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate it. It is an odd, strange, quirky film but I've seen it at least a dozen times if not more and don't tire of it. Ronald Stein's score is terrific, and there was a soundtrack album for this that was fairly faithful to the film's soundtrack. Of course there is more music in the film, but the soundtrack album is worth buying if you like this score (but it is hard to find). This was Merle Oberon's baby, she was behind the production of it and the homes seen in the film were hers.