it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

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.

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.

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.

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.