Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)

A Spanish coastal town that harbours quite a number of British expats, between the wars. The local lush living is dominated by beautiful Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner). Every man wants to destroy himself for her, every woman hates her (secretly or loudly), yet Pandora is mostly bored and disenchanted. Even when she convinces a race car driver to push his self-built vehicle into the ocean to prove his love, or gets her very own love suicide going, this only provides her with some flickering excitement for a minute or two. She’s not only lacking in human compassion but also all deeper human connection.

Things change when Hendrick van der Zee (James Mason) arrives om town on his yacht, and a mythic pull develops between these two. The old tale of the Flying Dutchman might have more truth to it than most people would expect.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman’s director Albert Lewin was a very successful Hollywood producer, first for MGM, then for Paramount. From time to time, he directed a movie himself. These aren’t the films of a dabbler, but of a director and scriptwriter very consciously aiming for art in a deeply earnest and just as deeply bourgeois manner that should make them pretty much unwatchable in their serious, classics-quoting way. Yet somehow, this member of the educated classes showing off his education didn’t just strain for art but actually manage to reach it, perhaps in spite of himself.

Case in point, and Lewin’s best movie as far as I know, is this incredibly ambitious concoction of bohemian melodrama, ancient Greek myth and somewhat more modern European legend. Often, Pandora feels like Powell and Pressburger – this is nominally a British film - at their most melodramatic seen through the lens of Hollywood with arthouse aspirations.

There’s a sensually languid quality to the film’s look and feel that stands in stark – and pretty magical – contrast to its literary and (sometimes too) knowing dialogue, its allusions to culture and cultural detritus, and its palpable love for all manner of cultural production – be it music, Shakespeare, the poetry of Omar Khayyam or Ava Gardner’s face (though the last might be the point where culture and languidness meet). The film’s straining for the mythical qualities of Pandora (very much an embodiment of the old hat of the destructive force of female sexuality that makes quite a bit of European bourgeois culture rather awkward) and the Flying Dutchman is often a visible and palpable effort but it is that uncommon kind of strain that eventually reaches and envelops (is enveloped by?) what it wants to touch, until the overload of allusion and emotion becomes magical and hypnotic.

Part of this magic most certainly lies in Jack Cardiff’s lush photography and Lewin’s fearless – of ridicule, of too much emotion, of the wrong emotion, of overload – direction, but there’s also the brilliance of the performances that hit the unreal notes the material needs again and again, and the willingness of Lewin’s script to go to places scripts (certainly not one written by big shot Hollywood producers) in 1951 simply didn’t go – neither in theme, nor in eroticism, nor in frank honesty about the harshness of mythic love.

Elements here leave me uncomfortable: the film, like its male characters, seems unable to admit to the existence of a kind of love that isn’t based on destruction, death and sacrifice; Pandora’s commitment to being the belle dame sans merci is disquieting, particularly in a film that so clearly wants us to find her tragic. Yet, like with all capital-A art Lewin’s film is in dialogue with, feeling uncomfortable with it isn’t an argument against it.