The 1955 film Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing received three Oscars, including one for best original song. Bearing the same title as the film, this effort by composer Sammy Fain and lyricist Paul Webster was the Oscar-winning entry, beating out fine songs by Johnny Mercer ("Something's Gotta Give") and Alex North and Hy Zaret ("Unchained Melody"). The movie, which starred William Holden and Jennifer Jones, garnered five other nominations, including one for Best Picture. It was a great success, as was its hit song here. The music in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing is less intimate than that in many other Fain love songs, like the ever-popular "I'll Be Seeing You" (1938), which is beautiful in its tender yearnings and passionate character. In this 1955 effort, the melody is also melancholy in its lyrical warmth and soaring sense of romance, but it also exhibits a bigger, more colorful expressive manner. It begins with a sustained, powerful opening note, after which mostly everything else descends and gradually turns subdued. But as the melody gets set to return, the sonorities swell and that opening note comes back with power and passion. Popular song lovers will find this a memorable creation.

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