For Albert Lewin, Irving Thalberg’s right hand man at MGM during the 1930s and soon after a producer at Paramount, this was the fourth of six films he made as a director – the most personal and irregular out of them all. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is part of Hollywood’s interest in the supernatural, the figurative and chromatic that appeared in the early 1950s, but the dreamlike quality of other films was not painted in such tragic tones. A dark story of predestination, love (the life of both lovers is studded with death) and supernatural turmoil, the film creates a sense of disorientation by mixing up eras and iconographic indicators; it’s the 1930s, but the rustling full skirts, tight yellow or turquoise satin bustiers, the green scarf around Pandora’s shoulders are a magnificent display of 50s taste; it’s the 1930s, the nights are tender, but the Fitzgerald moon shines on beaches with classical statues and broken columns. A vague atmosphere of the jazz age (on the beach they dance to You’re Driving Me Crazy) is overpowered by a surrealist set that alludes to De Chirico and Dalí. Jack Cardiff made a decidedly important contribution to the film’s visual atmosphere. He had left Powell & Pressburger and brought his saturated, sensual Technicolor touch to Hollywood, and in this film he gives an inky gleam to the background and Ava Gardner’s wavy hair.
Made by a man who was by trade a producer, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman displays directing that certainly is not lacking in style: a recurring, almost obsessive feature in the film is a nearly imperceptible dolly shot that when approaching cuts faces out from the background, transforming them into a dreamlike halo, and when moving away always reveals something unexpected, something out of scale: a spectacular terrace on the beach, the broken arm of a statue. However, the most extraordinary thing that the camera captures is Ava Gardner’s immobile profile: Pandora and the Flying Dutchman is also a calculated film star celebration of the real Hollywood Venus of the era. We may prefer her as a young blossom in The Killers or in the fiery camp of The Barefoot Contessa (which was also shot by Cardiff and is indebted to Lewin’s film), but radiant Ava Gardner is what feeds this film, a splendor with traces of the times: her red lips, the embodiment of marble perfection. The flying Dutchman James Mason seems a little passive before such physical and spiritual beauty, but his twelve minute monologue in voice over with a flashback scene of him killing his wife and the ceiling dropping down (which owes much to Welles) is still a commendable work of the ancient art of acting. Pandora and the Flying Dutchman gets lost in the colors, formats and melodramatic impulses of the 50s, and critics were severe. However, Ado Kyrou liked the film and wrote enthusiastically about it (“as an aesthete, Lewin proclaims his fierce faith in love”). As Pauline Kael wrote, it is a film that is “one of a kind”, unique, syncretic and, in its own way, unrepeatable.

Paola Cristalli