edwagreen Sordid affair with older woman Merle Oberon and Steve Cochran as the two lovers. It takes most of the picture to finally realize who the real culprit is here as the topic of an incestuous relationship is finally inferred.Oberon plays an emotionally unbalanced woman who meets Cochran when he comes to Mexico on an engineering job for her brother-Curt Jurgens,who steals the scenes that he is in. He portrays her half-brother who took her from England after her mother died.Oberon, in the movie, goes from affair to affair without being able to make any final commitment to anyone. It is only after an attempted suicide by her, we discover what her brother has been up to.

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.

kinder-1 I came to this film because of Steve Cochran. Surprisingly, it is lovely to look at, has an over the top love story, and though a bit of editing would have helped in the last half hour, It is well acted for this genre. Katherine is a middle aged woman, whose self esteem is determined by the number of men who desire her. She meets Steve and something happens--they fall in love against all odds. With a half brother whose intentions are a bit bent, you wonder if the lovers will wind up with each other or go their separate ways. Oberon and Cochran in real life did both--a RL romance that ended with the film, but a connection that caused Oberon to ask the Los Angeles police to further investigate the cause of death for Steve on his boat 2 years later.They refused but she cared enough to risk headlines for him. Life IS sometimes stranger than fiction.

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.