Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

2hotFeature one of my absolute favorites!

Griff Lees Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

mrb1980 In 1963 I loved monster movies and westerns, because there was lots of action and all of that adult romantic stuff didn't get in the way. I hated movies like "Of Love and Desire" because all of the kissing and talking just seemed boring. I guess I like this movie more than when I was a kid, but it still seems fairly pointless.Steve Corey (Steve Cochran) is in Mexico on business and meets Katherine Beckmann (Merle Oberon) and her half brother Paul (Curt Jurgens). It doesn't take long for Corey to find that Katherine is a nymphomaniac, much to Paul's chagrin. Old boyfriend Gus (John Agar) causes a few complications before Corey and Katherine decide to live happily ever after.The gorgeous and lush color photography is a major plus here. However, the script is very tired and there are long stretches during which the cast talks and talks, with nothing really happening. Cochran, who usually played a scoundrel or gangster, seems miscast, and Agar is lifeless as usual. Oberon sure is beautiful, but all to little effect. The movie's pretty harmless but seems a lot longer than it really is. At least the cast tries, with mediocre results for viewers undemanding enough to watch the entire movie.

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.

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.

marbleann I love these types of movies. Merle Oberon playing a middle aged nymphomaniac. Curt Jurguns is her half brother. I swear there is some underlying incest issues going on. In any case she falls in love with the Steve Cochern character. Brother doesn't like it and sets her up. What I like about this movie other then the trashy plot is that the principles are all played by age appropriate people. We do not have a bunch of middle aged men chasing after young woman half their age. We have a middle aged John Agar and Steve Cochran playing middle aged Oberons other suitors. And the scenery is breathtaking. This is not Cukor but it is trashy enough to make it so bad it is good. And something good has to be said about a movie that actually has middle aged men lusting after a middle aged woman. How refreshing. Plus I am a big fan of Curt Jurguns.