Of Love and Desire (1963)

Pretty Good

Good concept, poorly executed.

A Masterpiece!

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

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.

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.

It seems that too few people have been privileged enough to bear witness to this magnificently presented, overheated camp epic. A sort of romantic science-fiction saga, it takes place in a world where every man in evidence wants a piece of Oberon and nearly all of them get some! Things kick off with a love song, somewhat wobbily crooned by none other than Sammy Davis Jr! Next, mining entrepreneur Cochran lands his plane in Acapulco in order to meet a local honcho who will be utilizing his services. However, Cochran is spirited away to a glamorous party at which the honcho (Jurgens) and his half-sister (Oberon) are mixing business (on his part) and pleasure (on her part.) Oberon's character is a highly neurotic sex-addict who causes her brother a fair share of grief. Cochran scarcely gets to meet Jurgens before Oberon has her hooks in him, playing a see-through version of hard-to-get one minute, then desperately tugging at his heartstrings the next. After their bedroom romp, Oberon is up and at 'em in the swimming pool (impressively sporting a bikini at age 53), soon joined by Cochran, who has to choose from a variety of suits, some left behind by her army of ex-lovers. He settles on a monogrammed bikini brief of his own (which he also displays admirably for a 46 year-old man), playfully indicating that whomever's initials are on it has left it behind. When Jurgens chides her behavior, Oberon has another meltdown, but soon overcomes it long enough to take Cochran on a lengthy jaunt all over the Mexican shoreline. Just as Cochran has decided he loves Oberon and is willing to overlook the legions of men who came before him, Jurgens schemes to break them apart with the help of the man (Agar) whose initials are on the swim-trunks. What follows is a heaving dollop of melodrama including attempted rape, attempted suicide and attempted acting by the principal actors who are trapped in an overheated, sometimes preposterous scenario! The climax involves a sidesplittingly hysterical scene in which Oberon frantically runs through every corridor, stairwell and foyer of a busy hotel and then out onto the street, all the time being confronted by man after man after man. There isn't a woman anywhere in sight! Suddenly, the entire city of Acapulco is male and they all have goo-goo eyes for her! This recap can only begin to describe the camp overload as Oberon changes from one eye-popping outfit to the next, always with a complimentary hairdo, flashy jewelry and false eyelashes that seem to have a life of their own. She even has a pointless scene in bed with her hair spread out on the pillow, a cruel reminder that this was once Cathy in "Wuthering Heights"! (Coincidentally, her character here is named Katherine.) Secret motives and pasts are revealed which shed light on the rather kinky earlier proceedings of the film. Filmed amid the properties and adopted homeland of Ms. Oberon, it's a colorful, briskly paced and vastly entertaining piece of dirty soap. Sadly, Cochran would die mysteriously on board a private boat not too long after this film. Oberon wasn't finished yet. After a glamorous role in "Hotel", she tried one last time to fashion a glamorous, romantic, Mexican-set weeper with "Interval", but it was even more disastrous. Director Rush, whose career could be described as a roller-coaster of highs and lows (one high being "The Stunt Man", for which he snagged an Oscar nom) would go on to direct one of the all-time good/bad screamfests "Color of Night".